Théophile Gautier
Captain Fracasse (Le Capitaine Fracasse)
Part I: Chapters I-V
Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
- Translator’s Introduction.
- Chapter I: The Castle of Melancholy.
- Chapter II: The Chariot of Thespis.
- Chapter III: The Inn of the Blue Sun.
- Chapter IV: Scarecrows for the Birds.
- Chapter V: At the Marquis’ Château.
Translator’s Introduction
Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was born in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of south-west France, his family moving to Paris in 1814. He was a friend, at school, of the poet Gérard de Nerval, who introduced him to Victor Hugo. Gautier contributed to various journals, including La Presse, throughout his life, which offered opportunities for travel to various countries, among others Spain, Italy, Russia, Turkey and Egypt. He was a devotee of the ballet, writing a number of scenarios including that of Giselle. At the time of the 1848 Revolution, he expressed strong support for the ideals of the Second Republic, a support which he maintained for the rest of his life.
A successor to the first wave of Romantic writers, including Chateaubriand and Lamartine, he directed the Revue de Paris from 1851 to 1856, worked as a journalist for La Presse and Le Moniteur universel, and in 1856 became editor of L’Artiste, in which he published numerous editorials asserting his anti-utilitarian credo of ‘Art for art’s sake’. Saint-Beuve secured his critical acclaim; he became chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1862, and in 1868 was granted the sinecure of librarian to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Napoleon III, having previously been introduced to her salon.
Gautier remained in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the aftermath of the 1871 Commune, dying of heart disease at the age of sixty-one in 1872.
Though ostensibly a Romantic poet, Gautier may be seen as a forerunner to, or point of reference for, a number of divergent poetic movements including Symbolism and Modernism.
Le Capitaine Fracasse, an episodic novel written in 1863, has as its protagonist the Baron de Sigognac, an impoverished seventeenth-century nobleman who, in the reign of Louis XIII of France, abandons his château to join a theatrical company so as to pursue a young actress whom he loves. (For members of this comedy troupe, Gautier adopted and adapted characters from the traditional commedia dell’arte.) Sigognac travels with them to Paris, intending to petition the king and seek financial aid in memory of the services rendered to royalty by his ancestors. When one of the actors dies, Sigognac replaces him, taking the stage name of Captain Fracasse (the name derived from the word fracas, a skirmish or commotion), and, despite his innate pride, acting the part of a hapless military man. The experience teaches him humility, and this in turn deepens his relationship with the young actress he adores. The novel illustrates Gautier’s love of the theatrical, whether drama or ballet; his ability to navigate the ranks of his society without fear or favour; his aesthetic and poetic sensibilities; his expert command of language; and the humour, humanity, and tenderness with which he deals with the world, in all his writing.
This enhanced translation has been designed to offer maximum compatibility with current search engines. Among other modifications, the proper names of people and places, and the titles given to works of art, have been fully researched, modernised, and expanded; comments in parentheses have been added here and there to provide a reference, or clarify meaning; and minor typographic or factual errors, for example incorrect attributions and dates, in the original text, have been eliminated from this new translation.
Chapter I: The Castle of Melancholy
On a slope of one of those barren hills that punctuate Les Landes, between Dax and Mont-de-Marsan, there stood, in the reign of Louis XIII, a manor-house, of the type commonly met with in Gascony, which the local villagers dignified by calling it a château.
Two square towers, topped with sloping four-sided candle-snuffer roofs, occupied the corners of a building the facade of which bore a pair of deeply-cut grooves indicating the former existence of a drawbridge, whose role had been reduced to that of a sinecure due to the filling-in of the moat. The manor-house possessed a somewhat feudal appearance, due to these tall watchtowers, and their conjoined weather vanes. The dark green of a sheet of ivy, half-enveloping one of the towers, contrasted happily with the grey hue of the stone, already ancient at that date.
Any traveller who had seen the castle from afar, its pointed ridges outlined against the sky, high above the broom and heather, might have judged it a suitable dwelling for a provincial squire; but, on approaching, their opinion would certainly have altered The path which led from the road to the château had been reduced, through the invasion of moss and parasitic vegetation, to a pale, narrow track, like tarnished braid on a threadbare coat. Two ruts filled with rainwater, inhabited by frogs, testified that carriages had once passed that way; but the complacency of those amphibians indicated a long period of possession combined with the certainty of remaining undisturbed. On the central strip bordered by straggling grasses, and soaked by a recent downpour, there was not a human footprint to be seen, and the scrub, burdened with gleaming drops of water, appeared not to have been cleared for many a long day.
Large leprous-yellow patches mottled the browned, disordered tiles of the roofs, whose rafters had rotted and given way in places; rust prevented the weather-vanes from turning, and thereby indicating a change in the wind’s direction; the dormer windows were blocked by shutters of warped and split wood. Rubble filled the barbicans of the towers, and of the half-score of windows of the facade, eight were barred by planks, while the other two displayed bombé glass panes, trembling at the slightest breath of the north wind amidst their network of lead. Between these windows, the plaster, fallen in flakes like scales of diseased skin, exposed disjointed bricks, and rubble-stone crumbling due to the pernicious influence of the moon. The doorway, framed by a stone lintel, whose roughened surface bore traces of ancient ornamentation blunted by time and neglect, was surmounted by a crude coat of arms that the most skilled herald would have been powerless to decipher, and whose mantling was fancifully convoluted, and not without numerous breaks, damaging to its continuity. The door panels still offered, towards the top, remnants of oxblood paint, and seemed to blush, ashamed of their state of disrepair; diamond-headed nails held their cracked boards together, and formed incomplete symmetries here and there. One of the door’s two leaves could be opened, and was sufficient for the passage of guests visiting the castle, evidently few in number, while against the jamb of the closed leaf rested a decayed wheel, now falling to pieces, the last remnant of a carriage that had perished during the previous reign. Swallows’ nests obscured the chimney-tops, and the corners of the windows, and, if it had not been for a thin wisp of pale smoke issuing from one of the brick chimneys, and twisting spirally like the chimney-smoke in those attempts at houses that schoolchildren scribble in the margins of their schoolbooks, one might have thought the house uninhabited: the cookery that was being performed in the depths below must have been meagre, since a soldier’s pipe would have produced denser fumes. This smoke was the only sign of life that the house gave, like those at death’s door whose continued life is revealed only by the mist produced by their breath.
If one pushed past the movable leaf of the door, which only yielded under protest, and turned with evident displeasure on its rusty and screeching hinges, one found oneself beneath a kind of ogival vault, older than the rest of the dwelling. It was supported on four bluish, sausage-like granite ribs arching to a projecting keystone on which one could see once more, only a little less worn, the coat of arms sculpted on the outer lintel, consisting of three storks in gold, on an azure field, or some such emblematic creatures since the shadow beneath the vault prevented one distinguishing them clearly. Sealed into the wall, were sheet-metal torch extinguishers, blackened by use, and iron rings to which the visitors’ horses were once tethered, now a very rare occurrence judging by the dust that coated them.
Exiting this porch, beneath which were two doorways, one leading to the apartments on the ground floor, the other to a room which might formerly have served as a guardroom, one emerged into a sad, bare, chilly courtyard, surrounded by high walls which were marked by long black stains from the rains of many a winter. In the corners of this courtyard, amidst rubble fallen from the broken cornices, grew nettles, wild-oats, and hemlock, while the interstices of the paving stones were filled with weeds.
At the far end, a ramp, flanked by stone railings adorned with stone orbs topped by spikes, led to a garden below the courtyard. The broken and dilapidated steps shifted underfoot or, if held in place, it was only by filaments of moss, and the roots of plants; and between the supports of the terrace sempervivums, wallflowers, and wild artichokes had grown.
As for the garden itself, it was slowly returning to a state akin to a woodland thicket or even, in places, virgin forest. With the exception of a square, where a few cabbages with veined, verdigrised leaves and starred by golden suns with black hearts were clustered, whose presence testified to some degree of cultivation, Nature was reclaiming her rights over that abandoned space, and erasing the traces of human activity whose vanishing she ever seems to delight in.
The unpruned trees had thrown forth eager branches in all directions. The boxwood hedges, intended to mark the outlines of borders and paths, had become bushes, having not been pruned for many years. Seeds, carried by the wind, had sprouted at random, and were growing with that perennial robustness peculiar to weeds, in beds once occupied by pretty flowers and rare plants. Brambles with thorny spurs arched from one edge of the various paths to the other, and hooked you as you passed, to prevent you from going further, and to hide from you this mysterious place of sadness and desolation. Solitude dislikes being surprised in a state of undress, and creates all sorts of defensive barriers around itself.
Yet, if one had persisted, without fearing the scratches delivered by the brushwood, or blows dealt by the branches, in following the ancient path to its end, a path which had become more obstructed and overgrown than a path in the woods, one would have arrived at a kind of rocky niche representing a rustic cavern. To the plants formerly sown in the stony interstices, such as irises, gladioli, and black-ivy, others had been added, persicaria, hart’s tongue ferns, and wild vines, which hung down like beards half-veiling a marble statue representing some mythological divinity, Flora or Pomona, who must have been very charming in her time and brought honour to the sculptor, but due to attrition was nose-less, like Medieval depictions of Death. The poor goddess carried in her basket, instead of flowers, mouldy and poisonous-looking mushrooms; she seemed to have been poisoned herself, patches of brown moss marking her once white body. At her feet, beneath a layer of green duckweed, a brown puddle, the residue of the rain, stagnated in a stone shell, since the lion’s mask above, which could still be partially discerned, no longer vomited water, receiving none from the blocked or vanished channels.
This grotesque ‘cabinet’, as it was then called, testified, ruined though it was, to a certain love of ease and taste for the arts, on the part of the former owners of the castle. Suitably cleaned and restored, the statue would have revealed the style of the Florentine Renaissance, executed in the manner of those Italian sculptors who came to France in the wake of ‘Il Rosso’ (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, 1495–1540) or Francesco Primaticcio (1504-1570), such being the probable period when the now fallen family had flourished in splendour.
The cavern had been constructed adjoining a green, saltpeter-covered wall, erected at the time of the cavern’s construction, which was still crisscrossed by fragments of broken trelliswork, no doubt intended to hide the wall’s surface beneath a curtain of leafy climbing plants. This wall, barely visible through the disordered foliage of now enormous trees, bordered the garden on the inner side. Beyond stretched the moor, its melancholy bareness dotted with heather.
Returning to the castle, the facade opposite that just described, when viewed, appeared even more ravaged and eroded than the latter, the later owners having tried to keep up appearances by concentrating their limited resources on the side previously described.
In the stable, where twenty horses could have been stabled at ease, a lean Breton pony, whose rump jutted forth in bony protuberances, was pulling a few strands of straw from an empty rack with the tips of his loose yellowed teeth, and from time to time turning toward the door an eye set in a socket within whose depths the rats of Montfaucon (where the main gallows and gibbet of the Kings of France were sited, in Paris, until the time of Louis XIII) would not have found the slightest morsel of fat. At the threshold of a kennel, a lone dog slumbered, draped in overly-loose skin beneath which his relaxed muscles were outlined in flaccid lines, his muzzle resting on the meagrely padded pillows of his front paws; he seemed so accustomed to the solitude of the place that he had renounced all pretence of guarding it, and showed no sign of alarm, as dogs, even when drowsy, are wont to do, at the slightest noise they hear.
If one chose to enter the dwelling, one encountered an enormous staircase with a wooden banister and carved balusters. This staircase had only two landings, the building containing no more than two floors. It was constructed of stone up to the first floor, and of bricks and wood from there onwards. On the walls, grisailles partially devoured by humidity had at one time sought to imitate the relief-work of richly-decorated architecture, through the use of chiaroscuro and perspective. One could still divine a series of panels portraying the Labours of Hercules, topped by a moulding, beneath a cornice supported by modillions (projecting brackets) from which arched a bower of foliage festooned with vine branches, revealing a sky, faded in colour, and divided into curious islands by the infiltration of rainwater. Between the Hercules’ panels, busts of Roman emperors and other illustrious figures from history were painted, in niches; but all was so vague, faded, ruined, or obliterated, that it was rather the ghost of art than art itself, that could be seen, and one would need to describe it with the shadows of words, ordinary words themselves being too substantial to convey its state. The echoes in this empty space seemed quite surprised at repeating the sound of footsteps.
A green door, whose serge had yellowed, and was held together only by a few gilded nails, led into a room that might have served as a dining room, in the fabled days when people indeed dined in this deserted dwelling. A large beam divided the ceiling into two compartments lined with exposed joists, the interstices of which had once been covered with a layer of blue, now obliterated by dust and cobwebs, which no brush would ever disturb at that height. Above the fireplace, ancient in form, a ten-tined stag’s head spread its antlers, and along the walls on darkened canvases smoky portraits representing armoured military captains grimaced, their helmets beside them or held by a page, and gazed at one from profoundly black eyes, the only features seemingly alive in the dead faces of those lords in velvet jackets, their heads supported by stiff starched ruffs, each rather like the head of Saint John the Baptist on the silver platter; or they showed dowagers in old-fashioned costumes, terrifying in their lividity and taking on, through the decomposition of the colours, the appearance of Striges, Lamias and Empusai. These paintings, executed by provincial daubers, presented, due to the very barbarity of the work, a heterogeneous and formidable appearance. Some lacked frames; others had borders of tarnished and reddened gold. All bore at their corners the family crest and age of the person represented; but whether the number of years was low or high, there was no appreciable difference between these different heads with their yellowing hues, and dark charred shadows, smoky with varnish, and sprinkled with dust. The colour tones of two or three of these canvases, faded and covered with a flowering of mould, were those of a rotting corpse, and proved that the last descendant of these men of lineage and military prowess, was wholly indifferent to the effigies of his noble ancestors. At eve, this silent and motionless array was doubtless transformed, in the wavering light of the lamps, to a gallery of ghosts, at the same time both terrifying and ridiculous. Nothing is sadder than such forgotten portraits in deserted rooms; half-erased versions of forms long since vanished below the ground.
As it was, those painted ghosts seemed fitting guests to adorn the desolate solitude of the dwelling. Real inhabitants would have seemed far too alive for that dead house.
In the centre of the room stood a table of blackened pear-wood, its legs carved in spirals like Solomonic columns, which woodworms, undisturbed in their silent work, had pricked with a myriad of holes. A thin grey layer, on which the finger could have traced a message, covered its surface, and showed that the table was not often set for diners.
Two sideboards or credenzas in the same wood, decorated with carvings and probably purchased along with the table in happier times, were placed on either side of the room; chipped earthenware, disparate pierces of glassware and two or three rustic figurines, by the potter Bernard Palissy, representing eels, fish, crabs and shells, enamelled on a background of greenery, occupied the otherwise empty shelves.
Five or six chairs covered in velvet that might once have been crimson, but which years and use had rendered a yellowish red, allowed their stuffing to escape through gaps in the fabric, and limped on disparate feet like halting iambic verse, or crippled soldiers returning home after a war. Unless one were a mere spirit, it would have been imprudent to sit there, and, no doubt, those seats were only used when the host of ancestors, having quit their picture-frames, came to sit at the empty table and, over an illusory supper, chatted among themselves, during those long wintry nights so suited to ghostly feasts, regarding the family’s decay.
From this room one entered another, slightly smaller, one. A Flemish tapestry, one of those termed ‘Verdures’ (depicting verdant wooded landscapes) adorned the walls. Let not the word ‘tapestry’ awaken in your imagination the idea of inappropriate luxury. This one was worn, threadbare, and faded; hundreds of loose threads, in coming unwoven, had permitted gaps in the fabric, and the fragments were held together only by a few remaining threads, and longstanding habit. Their discoloured representations of trees were yellowish on one side and bluish on the other. The heron, standing on one leg among the reeds, had suffered considerably from moth damage. The Flemish farm, its wellhead festooned with hops, was almost indistinguishable and of the pale face of the hunter in pursuit of wild duck his scarlet mouth and dark eyes, their dyes apparently more resistant than the rest, had alone retained their original colouring, so that he looked like a corpse, of waxen pallor, whose mouth had been vermilioned and whose eyebrows had been highlighted. Currents of air played between the surface of the wall and the loose fabric, endowing it with curious undulations. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, if he had been soliloquising there, would doubtless have drawn his sword and poked at Polonius, concealed behind the arras, while crying: ‘A rat! A rat!’ (See Act 3, scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play) A thousand little noises, almost-imperceptible whispers, in the room, rendering the silence more tangible, disturbed the ears and thoughts of any visitor bold enough to penetrate there. The mice nibbled hungrily at some strands of wool on the underside of the fabric which had been woven on a low-warp (horizontal) loom. Woodworms rasped at the beams producing a dull noise like a file in use, and the fell hand of death struck the hour, with clockwork precision, against the wall-panels.
Sometimes a piece of furniture would creak unexpectedly, as if ennui, engendered by solitude, were stretching its joints, causing one, despite oneself, to shudder nervously. A four-poster bed with conical pillars, enclosed by brocatelle-fabric curtains open at every fold, whose green and white pattern had merged to a single yellowish tint, occupied a corner of the room, nor would one have dared to raise the hangings for fear of revealing, in the shadows, some crouching monster, or a stiff form outlined beneath the white sheets, with a pointed nose, bony cheekbones, clasped hands, and conjoined feet, like the feet of those commemorative statues adorning tombs, so swiftly do things made by human beings, and from which humanity is absent, take on a supernatural air! One might even have supposed that some innocent young princess, laid under a spell, was resting there in centuries-old slumber, like Sleeping Beauty, though the folds had too sinister a rigidity and seemed too mysterious for that, dispelling all ideas of Romance.
A black wooden table with a loosened copper inlay; a vague and cloudy mirror whose silver had blackened, weary of not reflecting a human figure; and an armchair its fabric worked in needlepoint, leisure’s patient labour brought to completion by some grandmother or other, but in which nothing but a few silver threads could be discerned amidst the faded silk and wool, completed the furnishings of this room, habitable only for a person who feared neither spirits nor ghosts.
These two rooms corresponded to the two unblocked windows of the facade. A pale, greenish light streamed through the frosted panes, which had last been cleaned a good hundred years ago, and which seemed tinted on the outside. Ample curtains, rumpled where they joined, and which would have been torn apart if anyone had tried to slide them along their rust-eaten rods, further diminished the dim light, adding to the melancholy of the place.
On opening the door at the end of the second room, one was plunged into complete darkness, entering a void, strange and obscure. Little by little, however, the eye became accustomed to the shadows, crossed by a few livid shafts of light filtering through the joints of the boards blocking the windows, and one discovered a confusing series of dilapidated rooms, with uneven parquet floors, strewn with broken panes of glass, their bare walls half-covered by a few shreds of frayed wallpaper, their ceilings revealing the rafters, and allowing water to drip from the sky above, admirably arranged for a horde of rats, and colonies of bats. In some places, it would not have been safe to advance, since the floor undulated and bent beneath one’s feet, though no one ever ventured into this Thebaid (desert) of shadow, dust and cobwebs. Standing at the threshold, a lingering odour, a scent of mould and abandonment, and the damp, black chill peculiar to dark places, rose to your nostrils as if one had lifted the stone sealing a vault, and leant into its icy darkness. Indeed, it was the corpse of the past that was slowly collapsing to dust in these rooms, in which the present never set foot; the silent years that rocked themselves, as if in hammocks, in the grey canvases occupying their corners.
Above, in the attics, barn owls and tawny owls roosted during the day, and jackdaws with their feathery ears, cat-like heads, and round phosphorescent eyes. The roof, collapsing in twenty places, allowed those amiable birds to come and go freely, they being as at-ease there as in the ruins of Montlhéry (in the Île-de-France) or Château Gaillard (in Normandy). Every evening, the dusty occupants flew forth, uttering those clamorous cries that trouble superstitious folk, to seek far-off the nourishment absent from their barren tower.
The ground-floor rooms contained nothing but a half-dozen bales of straw, corn-stalks, and a few gardening implements. In one of these rooms lay a straw mattress filled with dry heads of Turkish wheat and cloaked by a rough woollen coverlet, which appeared to constitute the bed of the only servant in the manor house.
Since my reader may have been wearied by this tour amidst solitude, misery and abandonment, let me take him or her to the only room in the deserted castle that possessed any life, that is the kitchen, whose chimney emitted to the sky that pale, whitish cloud mentioned in the external description of the castle.
A meagre fire licked the chimney-back, with yellow tongues of flame, and from time to time reached the bottom of a cast-iron pot with a handle, that hung from the iron rack, while faint reflections illuminated with their reddish gleams the rims of a few saucepans attached to the wall, amidst the shadows. Daylight falling through the large chimney-pipe with reached the roof unbendingly, highlighted the ashes with bluish tints, and made the fire appear paler, thus, in that cold hearth, the very flames seemed frozen. Without the precaution of its cover the pot would have filled with rainwater, and storms diluted the broth.
The water, slow to heat, finally began to boil, and the kettle complained in a low tone, like an asthmatic person: a few cabbage-leaves simmering, indicated that the still-cultivated portion of the garden had been used for this more than Spartan broth.
A scrawny old black cat, as threadbare as a worn-out muff, the missing fur revealing bluish skin in places, was seated on its rump, as close to the fire as possible without its whiskers burning, and stared at the pot, the pupils of its green eyes as narrow as a letter I, with an air of interested surveillance. Its ears had been cropped close to its head, and its tail close to its spine, which gave it the appearance of those Japanese monsters that are placed in cabinets among other curiosities, or even of those fantastic creatures whom witches, off to their Sabbath, entrust with the task of tending the cauldron in which their potions are seething.
This cat, all alone in the kitchen, appeared to be cooking soup for himself, and doubtless it was he who had set out, on the oak table, a plate decorated in green and red, a pewter goblet, presumably polished with his claws as it was so scratched, and a stoneware pot on the sides of which the coats of arms seen in the porch, on the keystone, and adorning the portraits, was roughly drawn in blue.
Who would seat themselves at this modest meal, in this manor without inhabitants; perhaps the familiar spirit of the house, the genius loci (the spirit of the place), the Kobold (the household spirit, ‘hausgeist’) faithful to its adopted home, while the black cat, with the profoundly mysterious gaze, was waiting for its arrival to serve the soup, napkin on paw.
The pot boiled away; the cat remained motionless at its post, like a sentry whose relief had been neglected. At last, a heavy and ponderous footstep was heard, that of an old person; a short preliminary cough sounded, the door latch creaked, and a man, half-peasant, half-servant, entered the kitchen.
At the appearance of the newcomer, the black cat, which seemed a long-time friend of the man, left the hearth and the glowing ashes, and rubbed itself amicably against his legs, arching its back, opening and closing its claws, and emitting from its throat that hoarse murmur which indicates the highest level of satisfaction amongst the feline race.
‘Well, well, Beelzebub,’ said the old man, bending down to pass a calloused hand twice or thrice over the cat’s hairless back, so as not to be outdone in politeness by an animal: ‘I know that you love me, and we are solitary enough here, my poor master and I, not to disparage the caresses of a creature lacking a soul, but which nevertheless seems to understand us.’
These mutual courtesies completed, the cat began to walk away from him, leading him towards the fireplace, as if to direct him to the pot, which it was looking at with the most touching air of eager covetousness in the world, for Beelzebub was beginning to grow old, his hearing was less acute, his eyesight less sharp, his paw less nimble than before, and the resource that hunting birds and mice had formerly provided was noticeably diminished; therefore, he kept an eye on the soup, of which he hoped to receive a share, and which caused him lick his lips in anticipation.
Pierre, for that was the old servant’s name, took a bundle of twigs, and threw them onto the half-dead fire; they crackled and contorted, and soon a flame, preceded by a billow of smoke, rose bright and clear amidst a joyous fusillade of sparks. It seemed as if the salamanders of legend were frolicking and dancing in the flames. A poor pulmonic cricket, delighted with the warmth and brightness, even tried to chirp by rubbing its wings together, but only managed to produce a wheezing sound.
Pierre, draped in an old piece of green serge, with a toothed border, and yellowed by smoke, sat down on a wooden stool before the hearth, with Beelzebub beside him.
The glow of the fire illuminated his features, which age, sunlight, fresh air, and the inclemency of the seasons had smoked, so to speak, till they were darker than those of a native of the Caribbean; a few strands of white hair, escaping from his blue beret and plastered to his temples, further enhanced the brick tones of his swarthy complexion; his black eyebrows provided a contrast with his snowy hair. Like others of the Basque nation, he had an elongated face, and a nose like the beak of a bird of prey. Large vertical wrinkles, like sabre cuts, furrowed his cheeks from top to bottom.
A sort of livery with faded braid, and of a colour that a professional painter would have found difficulty in defining, half-covered his chamois jacket, rendered shiny and black in places due to the friction produced by a breastplate, producing on its yellow surface tints like those that render green the belly of a well-hung partridge; for Pierre had been a soldier, and some remnants of his military gear were now visible in his civilian attire. His narrow breeches revealed the warp and weft of a material as light as embroidery canvas, and it was impossible to know whether they had been made of broadcloth, ratteen, or serge. All texture had long since disappeared from these worn breeches; never was a eunuch’s chin more hairless. Noticeable patches, added by a hand more accustomed to holding a sword than a needle, which had addressed their weak points, testified to the care taken by the garment’s owner to extend its longevity to the furthest point. Like Nestor, these ancient breeches had lived three ordinary lifetimes. It is a strong probability that they were once red, but that vital fact is not absolutely proven.
Rope-soled shoes, which recalled Spanish alpargatas (espadrilles), attached with blue-cord to woollen stockings from which the foot had been removed, served as Pierre’s footwear. These coarse buskins had doubtless been chosen as being more economical than court shoes or drawbridge shoes (solid shoes with a gap between the heel and the sole), since a strict, sober, and honest poverty was betrayed in the smallest details of the old man’s appearance and even in his pose of gloomy resignation. Sitting with his back against the inner side wall of the chimney, he crossed his large hands, reddened to purplish tones like vine leaves in late autumn, over his knees, so forming a motionless counterpart to the cat, Beelzebub, crouched in the ashes opposite him, with a famished and pitiful air, and gazing with profound attention at the asthmatic bubbling of the cooking pot.
‘The young master is very late today,’ murmured Pierre as, through the smoky, yellow panes of the only window that lit the kitchen, he watched the last streak of sunlight fade and diminish at the edge of a sky marked by heavy, rain-filled clouds. ‘What pleasure does he find walking alone on the moor this way? Though it’s true this castle is so sad nowhere else could inspire a greater feeling of tedium.’
A hoarse but joyous barking was now heard; the pony, in the stable, stamped the ground, making the chain that tethered it to the side of its manger rattle; the black cat interrupted its grooming by passing a paw, moist with saliva, over its face, and cropped ears, and stepped towards the door in the manner of a polite and affectionate creature that knows its duty and conforms to it.
The door opened; Pierre rose, respectfully removing his beret as the newcomer appeared in the room, preceded by the old dog we have already mentioned, who attempted to leap up but fell back heavily, weighed down by age. Beelzebub declined to treat the dog, Miraut, with the antipathy that his peers usually profess for canines. On the contrary, he looked at him in a very friendly manner, rolling his green eyes, and arching his back. It was clear that they had known each other for a long time and often kept each other company amidst the solitude of the castle.
The Baron de Sigognac, for it was the young lord of the dilapidated mansion who had just entered the kitchen, was a young man of twenty-five or twenty-six, although at first glance one might have thought him older, so grave and serious did he appear. The feeling of impotence, which accompanies poverty, had made all gaiety flee his features and the bloom of spring, which smooths young faces, fade. Bistre-coloured halos already encircled his bruised eyes, and his hollow cheeks strongly accentuated the prominence of his cheekbones; his mustachios, instead of being cheerfully pointed, drooped a little, and seemed to weep sadly beside his mouth; his hair, combed without due care, hung in black locks around his pale face, with an absence of coquetry rare in a young man who might have passed for handsome, and showing an absolute renunciation of any thought of pleasing. His habit of nursing a secret sorrow had caused sharp lines to mar a countenance which a modicum of happiness would have rendered charming, and the resolution natural to his years, seemed to have yielded before some misfortune countered in vain.
Although agile, and of a constitution rather robust than weak, the young baron moved with the apathetic sluggishness of one who had relinquished life. His gestures were feeble and somnolent, his countenance inert, and one saw that he was perfectly indifferent as to whether he was here or there, abroad or at home.
His head was covered with an old greyish felt hat, dented and torn, and much too broad, which sloped down almost to his eyebrows, forcing him to raise his nose in order to see clearly. A feather, whose sparse barbs gave it the appearance of a fishbone, was attached to the hat, and was obviously intended to act as a plume, but drooped behind limply as if ashamed of itself. A collar of antique guipure lace, not all of whose shape was due to the skill of its creator, and to which years had added more than one feature, lay flat against his jerkin, the loose folds of which announced that it had been tailored for a man taller, and more ample in form, than the slender baron. The sleeves of his doublet hid his hands like the sleeves of a monk’s robe, and he was plunged almost to his thighs in ‘cauldron’ boots (also termed ‘court’ boots, the knee piece flared in the shape of a funnel or cauldron) equipped with iron spurs. This motley wear was that of his late father, who had been dead for some years, and whose clothes, already ripe for the second-hand clothes dealer at the time of the death of their previous owner, he was wearing to their end. Dressed thus, in garments fashionable perhaps at the beginning of the previous reign, the young baron looked at once ridiculous and touching; one might have taken him for his own grandfather. Though he professed for the memory of his father a completely filial veneration, and tears often came to his eyes when he donned these dear relics which seemed to preserve in their folds the gestures and attitudes of the deceased gentleman, it was not exactly out of preference that young Sigognac adorned himself with the contents of his father’s wardrobe. He had no other clothes, and had been pleased to disinter this portion of his inheritance from the depths of a trunk. The garments from his adolescent years no longer fitted. At least, in his father’s clothes, he was comfortable. The local villagers, accustomed to seeing a doublet on the old baron’s shoulders, judged it no more ridiculous on the son’s back, and greeted it with the same reverence and deference; they no more noticed the rents in that doublet than the cracks in the castle walls. Sigognac, poor as he was, was still their lord in their eyes, and the decline of the family did not strike them as forcibly as it might have struck a stranger; and yet it was a somewhat grotesque and melancholy spectacle seeing the young baron pass by in his old clothes, on his aged horse, accompanied by his aged dog, like the knight in Albrecht Durer’s engraving (‘Knight, Death, and the Devil’, 1513).
The Baron seated himself, silently, at the table, after responding with a kindly gesture of the hand to Pierre's respectful greeting. The latter detached the cooking-pot from its rack and poured the contents onto a piece of bread he had already placed in the common earthenware bowl which he set before the Baron; it was the everyday soup still eaten in Gascony, under the name of ‘garbure’ (combining slow-cooked vegetables of all kinds with preserved meats); then he took from the cupboard a block of ‘miasson’ (thick cornmeal pancake, baked in the oven) quivering on a napkin, sprinkled it with a little corn-flour and brought it to the table on the board that supported it. This local dish with the ‘garbure’ and a piece of purloined bacon, once doubtless the bait of a mousetrap, formed, in all its meagreness, the Baron’s frugal meal. The latter ate with a distracted air, Miraut and Beelzebub on either side, both eagerly raising their muzzles in the air on each side of his chair, hoping for some crumbs from the ‘feast’ to fall to them. From time to time the Baron threw a mouthful of bread, whose close proximity to the slice of bacon had granted it at least the aroma of meat, to Miraut, who did not let the piece reach the ground. The crust fell to the black cat, whose satisfaction was expressed by a low growl, and a paw extended, claws out, as if ready to defend its prey.
His frugal repast over, the Baron seemed to yield to painful thoughts, or at least to a distraction whose subject was far from pleasant. Miraut laid his head on his master’s knee and fixed on him eyes that age had clouded with a bluish veil, yet in which a spark of almost human intelligence nonetheless flickered. One would have said that he understood the Baron’s thoughts and wished to show his sympathy. Beelzebub, the cat, made his purring noise, much like the hum of a spinning wheel turning as loudly as that of ‘Bertha the Spinner’ (Bertha of Swabia, also known as La Filandière or La Reine Fileuse, twice Queen of Italy in the 10th century), and he uttered little plaintive cries to attract the Baron’s fleeting attention. Pierre stood some distance apart, as motionless as those long, stiff, granite statues one sees on the porches of cathedrals, respecting his master’s reverie, and awaiting his command.
Meanwhile, night had fallen, and great shadows filled the corners of the kitchen, like giant bats clinging to the walls with fingers cloaked in membranous wings. A remnant of fire, fanned by the gusts of wind blowing down the chimney and into the fireplace, coloured with strange reflections the group gathered around the table in a sort of sad intimacy that further emphasised the castle’s melancholy solitude. Of the once powerful and wealthy family, only this single isolated offspring remained, wandering like a shade about the manor peopled by his ancestors; of the large household, only this one devoted and irreplaceable servant was left; of the pack of thirty hounds, only the one dog survived, almost blind and grey with age, while the lone black cat served as the soul of the deserted dwelling.
The Baron signalled to Pierre that he wished to withdraw.
‘His frugal repast over, the Baron seemed to yield to painful thoughts’
Pierre, stooping to the hearth, lit a length of pine wood coated with resin, a kind of economical candle used by the poor, and preceded the young lord; Miraut and Beelzebub joined the procession: the smoky glow of the torch made the faded frescoes on the walls of the staircase flicker, giving an appearance of life to the smoky portraits in the dining room whose black, fixed gaze seemed to cast a pained look of pity on their descendant.
Arriving at the curious bedroom I described previously, the old servant lit a small copper lamp with a nozzle, whose wick was folded in the oil like a tapeworm steeped in alcohol in an apothecary’s timepiece, and withdrew, followed by Miraut. Beelzebub, who savoured his grand entrances, settled himself in one of the two armchairs. The Baron collapsed in the other, overcome by solitude, idleness, and ennui.
If his chamber looked like a roomful of ghosts during the day, it appeared even worse at night, in the wavering light of the lamp. The tapestry took on livid tones, and the huntsman, against a background of dark vegetation, seemed, illuminated thus, almost real. With his arquebus at the ready, he resembled an assassin waiting for his victim, and his red lips were highlighted even more strangely in his pale face. His mouth looked like that of a vampire flushed with blood.
In the damp atmosphere, the lamp gave off a crackling sound, and threw forth intermittent gleams; the wind caused the corridors to give out organ-like sighs; while frightening and unusual noises were heard issuing from the rooms.
The weather had worsened, and large drops of rain, driven on gusts of wind, tinkled against the panes of glass and rattled them in their networks of lead. Sometimes the glass seemed about to bend, and part from its frame, beneath the pressure from outside. It was as if the storm was leaning against the frail obstacle. Sometimes, to add a further note to the strange harmony, one of the owls, nesting beneath the roof, would utter a cry like that of a child whose throat was being cut, or, troubled by the light, would fly down to strike the window with slowly beating wings.
The lord of this sad manor, accustomed to such gloomy symphonies, paid no attention. Beelzebub alone, with the anxiety natural to members of his species, stirred the roots of his cropped ears at every noise and stared fixedly into the dark corners, as if he had perceived, by employing his scotopic vision, something invisible to the human eye. This far-seeing cat, with his diabolical name and manner, would have alarmed a less brave person than the Baron; for the creature seemed to know many things learned in his nocturnal wanderings through the attics and uninhabited rooms of the castle; more than once, at the end of a corridor, he must have encountered that which might turn a person’s hair white.
Sigognac took from the table a small volume whose tarnished binding bore the stamped crest of his family, and began to turn the leaves with an indifferent finger. Though his eyes followed the lines exactly, his mind was elsewhere, or showed only a mediocre interest in Ronsard’s short odes (odelets) and love sonnets, despite their lovely rhymes, and their ideas acquired from the Greeks. It was not long before he set the book down, and began to unbutton his doublet slowly, like a man who has no desire for sleep but, weary of war, lies down because he knows not what else to do, and seeks to drown his boredom in slumber. The grains of sand in the hourglass fall slowly and sadly on a dark, rainy night in the depths of a ruined castle, surrounded by a sea of heather, and bare of a single living being for ten leagues about!
The young Baron, now the sole survivor of the Sigognac family, had, indeed, many reasons for melancholy. His ancestors had ruined themselves in various ways, whether through gambling, warfare, or the vain desire to shine amongst their peers, such that each generation had bequeathed an increasingly diminished heritage to the next.
The fiefs, farms, tenant-farms, and land that belonged to the castle had vanished item by item; and the previous Baron de Sigognac, after incredible efforts to restore the family fortune, efforts without result because it is ever too late to repair the leaks in a sinking ship, had left to his son only the castle in disrepair, and the few acres of sterile land that surrounded it; the rest had to be abandoned to his creditors.
Poverty had thus cradled the young child in its thin hands, and he had suckled at a withered breast. Deprived, while yet very young of his mother who had died of melancholy in that dilapidated castle, thinking on the misery that would later weigh on her son and prevent him winning a career, he had lacked the sweet caresses and tender care with which youth is surrounded, even in the least happy of families. The solicitude of his father, whose absence he nonetheless regretted, had hardly translated into anything more than a few kicks in the rear, or the order that the whip be applied to it. Now, he was so filled with ennui that he would have been happy to receive one of those paternal admonitions whose memory brought tears to his eyes; for a kick dealt by the father to the son still represents a human relationship of a kind, and, during four years that the old Baron had lain outstretched beneath his flagstone in the Sigognac family vault, his son had lived in the midst of a profound solitude. His youthful pride rendered him reluctant to appear among the nobility of the province, at festivals or hunts, without the equipage appropriate to his status.
What would they have said, indeed, on seeing the Baron de Sigognac dressed like a beggar at the door, or like an apple-picker from Le Perche (in Normandy, famed for its orchards and cider)? This consideration had prevented him from offering his services as a servant to some prince. Many were those who believed that the line of the Sigognacs was extinct, and oblivion, which hides the dead even more swiftly than the grass, had erased this once important and wealthy family, while pitifully few were those who knew of the existence of a last descendant of that diminished race.
For some moments, Beelzebub had seemed restless; he raised his head as if he suspected some disturbance; he stood against the window, pressing his paws against the panes, trying to pierce the sombre black of the night streaked with an impressed hatching of raindrops; his nose wrinkled and twitched. A prolonged howl from Miraut, amidst the silence soon endorsed the cat’s pantomime; something unusual was definitely happening in the vicinity of this castle, usually so quiet. Miraut continued to bark with all the energy that chronic hoarseness allowed him. The Baron, to be ready for any eventuality, buttoned the doublet he had been about to doff and rose to his feet.
‘What’s driving Miraut to make such a racket, he who as soon as the sun sets ever snores like the Seven Sleepers’ dog, midst the straw in his kennel? Could a wolf be prowling near the walls?’ said the young man to himself, girding on a broad iron sword which he detached from the wall, and buckling the belt at its innermost hole, since the leather cut to fit the old baron’s waist would have gone twice round that of the son.
Three violent knocks on the castle door sounded at measured intervals, making the empty rooms echo. Who could it be at this hour who disturbed the manor’s solitude and the nocturnal silence? What unwise traveller now knocked at a door which had not been opened for a guest for so long a period of time, though not through lack of courtesy on the part of the master, but merely because of the absence of visitors? Who sought to be received in this inn of starvation, this plenary courtyard of Lent, this hotel of misery and poverty?
Chapter II: The Chariot of Thespis
Sigognac descended the stairs, employing his hand to protect his lamp against the drafts that threatened to extinguish it. The light of the flame penetrated his thin phalanges, and coloured them a diaphanous red, so that, although it was night and he was followed by a black cat instead of himself preceding the sun, he deserved the epithet applied by the good Homer to the hands of Dawn (‘rosy-fingered’).
He lowered the bar at the door, half-opened the movable leaf, and found himself facing a personage, to whose nose he held his lamp. Illuminated by its rays, a somewhat grotesque figure was highlighted against the shadowy background without: amidst the rain, a skull the colour of rancid butter gleamed in the light. Grey hair plastered to the temples; a nose crimson as September wine (traditionally a strong, well-aged, red), and adorned with small buboes, which flowered on the bulbous heights, between two small odd-shaped eyes covered with very thick and strangely black eyebrows; flabby cheeks, marked by winey tones, and crossed with reddened veins; the swollen lips of a drunkard and satyr; and a chin decked out with a wart in which were implanted a few rough, harsh hairs like those on a clothes-brush, composed a physiognomy wholly worthy of those sculpted faces beneath the cornice of the Pont-Neuf in Paris. A certain look of witty bonhomie tempered a visage that might have appeared uninviting at first glance. The creases at the corners of the eyes and the lips directed towards the ears indicated the makings of a gracious smile. This head of a marionette, set on a ruff of equivocal whiteness, surmounted a body in a loose black smock, that bowed in an arc with an exaggerated affectation of politeness.
The salutations accomplished, the burlesque character, anticipating, on the Baron’s lips, the question that was about to spring from them, said, in a slightly emphatic and declamatory tone: ‘Please forgive me, noble castellan, if I come knocking at the postern of your fortress without being preceded by a page, or a dwarf blowing a horn, and at this late hour. Necessity knows no laws, and forces the politest people in the world to barbaric conduct.’
— ‘What is it you want?’ interrupted the Baron rather sharply, annoyed by the old fellow’s verbiage.
— ‘Hospitality for me and my comrades, princes and princesses, Leanders and Isabellas (commedia dell’arte characters), doctors and captains who travel from town to town, in the chariot of Thespis (the first actor, according to Greek legend, being also a poet and dramatist), which chariot, drawn by oxen in the ancient manner, is now stuck in the mud a few steps from your castle.’
— ‘If I understand you correctly, you are provincial actors on tour, and you have deviated from the straight and narrow?’
— ‘My words could not be better explained,’ replied the actor, ‘and what you say fits the situation precisely. May I hope that Your Lordship will grant my request?’
— ‘Though my house is rather dilapidated and has little to offer, you will nonetheless be a little more comfortable here than out in the open, in the pouring rain.’
The Pedant, for such appeared to be his commedia dell’arte role, bowed in assent.
During this conversation, Pierre, awakened by Miraut’s barking, had risen, and joined his master in the porch. Informed of what was happening, he lit a lantern, and all three headed towards the foundered wagon.
The ‘Leander’ and the ‘Captain Matamore’ (two other commedia dell’arte characters, ‘Matamore’ means ‘Braggart’) of the troupe set their shoulders to the wheels, while the ‘Tyrant’ pricked the oxen with his ‘tragic’ dagger. The women, wrapped in their cloaks, moaned in despair, and uttered little cries. The unexpected reinforcements, and especially Pierre’s experience, soon extracted the heavy wagon which, directed to firmer ground, reached the castle, passed under the ogival vault, and was soon stationary in the courtyard.
‘The unexpected reinforcements, and especially Pierre’s experience, soon extracted the heavy wagon.’
The unharnessed oxen went to take up their places in the stable, next to the white Breton pony; the actresses jumped out of the wagon, smoothing their crumpled skirts, and ascended, guided by Sigognac, to the dining room, the most habitable room in the house. Pierre found a bundle, and a few loose armfuls, of brushwood in the depths of the woodshed, which he added to the fireplace, and which began to blaze cheerfully. Though it was still only the start of autumn, the fire was necessary to dry the ladies’ damp clothing; besides, the night air was cold, and whistled through the disjointed woodwork of that frequently uninhabited room.
The actors, though accustomed by their wandering life to the most diverse lodgings, looked with astonishment at this strange dwelling which seemed long since abandoned to the shades of the dead, and which involuntarily gave rise to thoughts of past tragedies; yet, as well-bred people, they showed neither terror nor surprise.
— ‘I can give you no more than a table to eat at,’ said the young Baron, ‘my pantry barely contains enough to feed a mouse. I live alone in this manor, and never receive guests, and, as you can see without my saying, Fortune does not dwell here.’
— ‘No matter,’ replied the Pedant; ‘though, in the theatre, we are served cardboard chickens and bottles carved from wood, we deal, in real life, with more substantial dishes. Those hollow pieces of meat and simulated drinks would rest poorly on our stomachs, and, as quartermaster of the troupe, I always keep a little Bayonne ham in reserve, along with some venison pâté, a loin of Rivière veal (from the river-meadows near Rouen, by the Seine,), and half a score of bottles of Cahors and Bordeaux wine.’
— ‘Well said, Pedant,’ exclaimed Leander, ‘go and fetch the provisions, and if this lord permits it and deigns to sup with us, let us set the table here for a feast. There is enough crockery in these sideboards, and these ladies will set the table for us all.’
At a nod of assent from the Baron, who was quite astounded by the whole adventure, Isabella and Donna Serafina both seated near the fireplace, rose and laid the table, which had been previously wiped clean by Pierre, and covered with an old, worn, but still white tablecloth. The Pedant soon reappeared carrying a basket in each hand, and triumphantly placed, in the centre of the table a fortress of a pie with blond and golden walls, which enclosed within its flanks a garrison of ortolans and partridges. He surrounded this gastronomic fort with six bottles, to act as advanced works, which would have to be taken away before the fortress could be conquered. A smoked ox-tongue, and a slice of ham, completed the symmetry.
Beelzebub, who had perched on top of a sideboard and, full of curiosity, was following these extraordinary preparations with his eyes, tried to appropriate, at least by smell, all these exquisite things displayed in abundance. His truffle-coloured nose inhaled the fragrant emanations deeply; his green eyes exulted and sparkled, while a little hint of covetousness silvered his moist chin. He would have liked to approach the table and take his share of this Gargantuan-style feast so beyond the normally hermitic sobriety of the house; but the sight of all these new faces terrified him, and his cowardice countered his gluttony.
Not finding the light of the lamp sufficiently radiant, Captain Matamore recovered two theatrical torches, made of wood wrapped in gilded paper and each equipped with several candles, from the wagon, reinforcements which produced a rather magnificent level of illumination. Such torches, whose shape recalled that of the seven-branched candlestick of Scripture (see Exodus 25: 31-40), were ordinarily placed on the marriage altar, at the conclusion of plays with spectacular staging, or on the banquet table in Alexandre Hardy’s ‘Mariamne’ (c1605) and ‘La Marianne’ by Tristan L’Hermite (François L’Hermite, 1636; ‘La Marianne’ is derived from Hardy’s play).
In their light, and that of the blazing brushwood, the moribund room had taken on a kind of life. Faint blushes coloured the pale cheeks of the portraits once more, and if the virtuous dowagers, huddled in their ruffs and stiffened beneath their farthingales, took on a somewhat frosty air at the sight of the young actresses frolicking in that grave manor-house, the warriors and Knights of Malta, on the other hand, seemed to smile at them from the depths of their frames, happy to attend such a celebration, with the exception of two or three old grey-moustachioed gentlemen stubbornly sulking beneath their yellow varnish, and retaining, despite everything, the forbidding expressions with which the painter had endowed them.
A warmer and more lively air circulated in this vast room, where one usually breathed only the mouldy humidity experienced in a sepulchre. The decayed state of the furniture and hangings was less visible, and the pale spectre of misery seemed to have abandoned the castle even if only for a few moments.
Sigognac, to whom their surprising arrival had at first seemed disagreeable, gave way to an unknown sensation of well-being. Isabella, Donna Serafina, and even the Soubrette, gently troubled his imagination and seemed to him more like divinities descended to earth than mere mortals. They were, in fact, very pretty women, and would have occupied the thoughts of lesser novices than our young baron. All this produced a dream-like effect, and he feared at any moment to awake from its delights.
The Baron gave Donna Serafina his hand, and placed her on his right. Isabella took a seat on his left, the Soubrette sat opposite, the Duenna sat next to the Pedant, and Leander and Captain Matamore, sat where they chose. The young master of the castle was then able to study at leisure the faces of his guests, brightly-illuminated and highlighted in full relief. His examination focused first on the women, of whom it would not be out of place to draw a slight sketch here, while the Pedant made a breach in the ramparts of the pie.
Serafina was a young woman of twenty-four or twenty-five, whose habit of playing the grande coquette had given her a worldly air, and somewhat the manners of a lady of the Court. Her face, a slightly elongated oval, her slightly aquiline nose, her grey eyes set flush with her head, her crimson mouth, whose lower lip was cut by a small cleft, like that of Anne of Austria, and resembled a cherry, formed a charming and noble physiognomy, to which twin cascades of chestnut hair falling in waves across her cheeks contributed; a physiognomy to which animation and warmth had brought pretty shades of pink. Two longish locks of hair, each tied by a trio of rosettes of black ribbon, detached themselves capriciously from her crimped curls, and emphasised their vaporous grace much as do the vigorous touches a painter gives to the picture he is completing. Her round-brimmed felt hat, adorned with feathers, the last of which curled around the lady’s shoulders in a plume, while the others curled in billows, gave Serafina the look of a cavalier; a man’s turned-down collar, trimmed with Alençon lace, and fastened in front by a black ribbon, overlapped a green velvet dress with slashed sleeves, trimmed with braided cords and knots, whose cleavage allowed her linen to show; and a white silk scarf, across the shoulder, completed her gallant and resolute appearance.
Thus attired, Serafina had the air of a Penthesilea (the Amazonian queen who fought at Troy) or a Marfisa (the queen of India who fought for the Saracens in the ‘Orlando Innamorato’ of Matteo Boiardo, and its sequel the ‘Orlando Furioso’ of Ludovico Ariosto), most appropriate to adventures and comedies involving cloaks and swords. Certainly, all her attire was not in its first freshness, wear had polished the skirt’s velvet in places, the frieze-cloth was a little crumpled, the lace would have appeared a little russet in hue in broad daylight; the embroidery of the scarf, on closer inspection, was reddening, and betrayed the underlying strips of tinsel; several braided cords had lost their studs, and the braid of various knots had unravelled in places; the ruffled feathers of her plume flapped flaccidly against the edges of the felt, her hair was a little uncurled, and a few straws, acquired during the journey by hay-wagon, mingled rather poorly with its opulence.
These small details did not prevent Donna Serafina from showing the bearing of a queen without a kingdom. Though her dress was faded, her face was fresh and glowing, and, indeed, her attire seemed the most dazzling in the world to the young Baron de Sigognac, unaccustomed to such magnificence, and who rarely saw anything but peasant women dressed in sackcloth skirts and shiny woollen capes. He was, moreover, too preoccupied with the lady’s eyes to pay attention to any deficiencies in her costume.
The company’s ‘Isabella’ was younger than Donna Serafina, as her role as an ingénue required; nor was her costume so audacious, but of an elegant and bourgeois simplicity, as befits the daughter of Cassandro (a commedia dell’arte character, elderly and troublesome). She had a charming face, almost childlike; lovely hair, a silky chestnut in hue; eyes veiled by long eyelashes; a small heart-shaped mouth; and an air of virginal modesty, more natural than feigned. A bodice of grey taffeta, trimmed with black velvet and jet, extended downwards to a point over a skirt of the same colour; a ruff, slightly starched, rose behind her pretty neck where little curls of wild hair, and a string of false pearls bordered her nape; and although at first sight she attracted the eye less than did Serafina, she held the attention longer. If she did not dazzle, she charmed, which has its advantages.
The Soubrette fully deserved the epithet morena that the Spaniards endow brunettes with. Her skin was golden and tawny in tone like that of a gypsy-girl. Her thick, frizzy hair was a deep black, and her yellow-brown eyes sparkled with diabolical malice. Her mouth, large and crimson red, revealed a set of teeth, flashing white, that would have done credit to a wolf cub. In addition, she was lean, as if consumed by ardour and wit, but with that youthful healthy thinness that is not unpleasant to look at. She was doubtless as expert at delivering and receiving a love-letter in the city as on the stage; but the lady who used such a ‘Dariolette’ (a go-between; the character created by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo in his novel Amadis de Gaula, 1508) must surely be reliant on her charms! In her hands, more than one declaration of love had not reached its destination, and the neglected gallant was left lingering in the antechamber. She was one of those women whom their female companions find ugly, but who are irresistible to men, one seemingly seasoned with salt, pepper, and cantharides (Spanish fly, an extract from the blister beetle, a traditional aphrodisiac) though that fails to prevent them from being as cold as usurers when it comes to their own interests. A fanciful costume, blue and yellow with a bib of false lace, composed her attire.
Dame Leonarda, the noble mother of the troupe, was dressed all in black like a Spanish duenna. Her plump, many-chinned face was framed by a muslin headdress, pale and soiled as if by forty years’ worth of rouge. Shades of yellowed ivory, and old wax, paled her unhealthy plumpness, which derived more from age than unhealthiness. Her eyes, above which hung drooping eyelids, had a shrewd expression, and were like two black spots in her pale face. A few hairs were beginning to obscure the corners of her lips, although she carefully plucked them out with tweezers. Feminine character had almost disappeared from this face, the wrinkles of which might have a told a tale or two, had anyone taken the trouble to look for them. An actress since childhood, Dame Léonarda had followed a career in which she had successively filled all the roles, and now that of duenna, so difficult for the coquette to accept, being always unconvinced of the ravages of time. Leonarda had talent, and old as she was, she knew how to win applause, even when cast beside the young and pretty, who were surprised to see the cavaliers pay their addresses to this ‘witch’.
So much for the women. The main female roles of comedy were represented there, and if a character was missing, some wandering actor, or follower of the theatre, acquired along the way, was ever happy to take on some small role, and thus bolster the Angelicas and Isabellas. The male cast consisted of the Pedant, already described and to whom there is no need to return, Leander, Scapin, the Tyrant, and Captain Matamore, the Braggart.
(Left to right) The Tyrant, Captain Matamore, and Scapin
Leander, obliged by his role to render the fiercest Hyrcanian tigress as gentle as a sheep, to dupe Truffaldino (the ‘Servant of Two Masters’, in Carlo Goldoni’s play, and a variant of Harlequin), to push aside Ergastes (the shepherd in Honoré d’Urfe’s ‘Astrea’), and to ever appear superb and triumphant on stage, was a young man of thirty whose excessive care for his own person made him appear much younger. It is no small matter to represent, for the audience, the ‘Lover’, that mysterious and perfect being, whom each one fashions as he pleases after Amadis or Celadon (the lover in ‘Astrea’). So, Leander greased his muzzle with whale blubber, and floured himself every evening with talcum powder; his eyebrows, from which he plucked the unruly hairs with tweezers, each resembled a line drawn in Indian ink, and ended in a rat’s tail. His teeth, brushed to excess and rubbed with paste, shone like oriental pearls in his red gums, which he uncovered at every opportunity, ignoring the Greek proverb that says ‘a fool laughs even when nothing is amusing’ (Arsenius, 5.29b). His comrades claimed that, even in the city, he added a touch of rouge to brighten the effect of his eyes. Black hair, carefully arranged, twisted across his cheeks in shiny spirals, now a little sodden from the rain, which he took the opportunity to twine with a finger on which glittered a diamond much too large to be real, thus revealing a very white hand. His turned-down collar revealed a rounded, white neck shaved so closely that no beard was visible. A length of fairly clean linen showed between his jacket and his hose, piped with a world of ribbons, the preservation of which seemed to occupy him greatly. Gazing at the wall, he seemed to be dying of love, and could scarcely ask for a drink without swooning. He punctuated his sentences with sighs and, when talking about the most indifferent things, he winked, launched meaningful glances, and made laughable faces; but the women found him charming.
The Tyrant, for his part, was a most benign man whom nature had endowed, doubtless as a jest, with all the outward signs of ferocity. Never did a gentler soul display a more forbidding exterior. Large, black eyebrows, two fingers wide, as if they had been made of moleskin, meeting at the root of his nose; frizzy hair; a thick beard reaching up to his ears, which he neglected to trim so as not to have to adopt a hairpiece when he played the tyrannous Herod, or Polyphonte (see Voltaire’s ‘Mérope’, 1743); a swarthy complexion of a hue akin to that of Cordoba leather, gave him a truculent and formidable look, such as painters like to grant to executioners and their assistants, when depicting the flaying of Saint Bartholomew, or the beheading of John the Baptist. A bull’s bellow of a voice that made the windows tremble, and the glasses on the table rattle, contributed not a little to maintaining the terror inspired by his appearance, that of a bogeyman, which was enhanced by a black velvet doublet in an outmoded style; he achieved enormous success by howling out, terrifyingly, lines from the dramas of Robert Garnier and Georges de Scudéry. He was, moreover, ample in breadth, and capable of filling a throne.
Captain Matamore had a thinnish face, gaunt, dark, and scorched, like a hanged man in summer. His skin looked like parchment stuck to the bones beneath; while a large nose, curved like the beak of a bird of prey, the narrow bridge of which gleamed like horn, partitioned the two sides of a face like a shuttle-shaped knife-blade, which was further lengthened by a pointed goatee. These twin profiles, separate yet close together, found great difficulty in forming a whole face, and the eyes, to accommodate their presence, were upturned somewhat in the Chinese manner towards the temples. The half-shaven eyebrows curved into a black comma above anxious-seeming pupils; his moustaches, of an excessive length, greased and coated at each end with pomade, rose in an arc to stab at the sky; his ears set far apart from the surface of the head represented the twin handles of a cooking pot, and provided a grip for those who might deal a light flick or a punch to his nose. All these extravagant features, more caricatured than natural, might have been sculpted in playful fancy on the head of a rebec (a Medieval and early Renaissance stringed instrument with an angled head to the neck) or copied from those absurd creatures, those chimeras à la Rabelais, which rotate in the evening on pastry-cooks’ lanterns. His hair was tawny and, similar to a wolf’s coat was felt-like, reinforcing the character of some malicious beast that his physiognomy conveyed. One was tempted to look at the hands of this fellow to see if there were any calluses on them caused by handling the oar, for he certainly looked as if he had spent several seasons writing his memoirs, at sea, with that fifteen-foot quill. His falsetto voice, sometimes high, sometimes low, proceeded by sudden changes of tone and bizarre yelps, which surprised one, and made one laugh without wishing to; and his unexpected movements, as if determined by the sudden release of a hidden spring; represented something illogical and disturbing, and seemed to serve more to delay an interlocutor than to express a thought or a feeling. They were part of the fox’s swift gyrations, as he performed a hundred evolutions beneath the tree from the top of which the fascinated turkeys observed him before falling, dizzied, to the ground (see Aesop’s fable ‘The Fox and the Turkeys’). He wore a grey smock over his costume, the stripes of which were visible, either because he had not had time to undress after his last performance, or because the limited capacity of his trunk, allowed him too little room to pack both his city clothes and his theatrical clothes, but over the smock he had draped, for greater effect, a blanket whose border was raised by his sword, an oversized rapier that he never discarded, and whose iron hilt, of fenestrated openwork, weighed a good fifty pounds. Had he danced, his cockerel-legs would have swung about like flutes in their carrier when the musician bears them away. Such were the accoutrements of this rascal. Let me add, so as not to omit anything, that two cockerel-quills, bifurcated like a cuckold’s crest, adorned, grotesquely, his grey felt hat, which was extended into a funnel of cloth.
As for Scapin, he had a fox’s face, shrewd, pointed, mocking: his eyebrows rose on his forehead in the shape of circumflex accents, above swivel eyes ever in motion, whose yellow pupils trembled like gold coins in quicksilver; crow’s feet, forming malignant wrinkles, creased the corners of his eyelids fit to conceal lies, trickery, and deceit; his lips, thin and flexible, moved perpetually, and showed, through an equivocal smile, sharp canines rather ferocious in appearance; and, when he removed his white and red striped cap, his short hair revealed the contours of a strangely humped head. His boastful grimaces had become, in the long run, his habitual physiognomy and, on emerging from the wings, he would walk onstage, legs flung wide as those of a compass, head thrown back, his left hand, rounded in a fist, on his hip, and his right hand on the hilt of his sword. A yellow jerkin, curved like a cuirass, embellished with green, and slashed in the Spanish-style, its slits ranged along the ribs; a starched ruff supported by iron wire and cardboard, as wide as the Round Table and about which the Twelve Peers could have taken their meals; breeches adorned with, and held up by strips of braid; and pale shoes of Russian leather, completed his costume.
The writer’s art is inferior to that of the painter in that it can only describe objects successively. In a painting, a glance would be enough to grasp the various figures, grouped by the artist about the table, whose forms have just been detailed; one could view them there, the shadows and highlights, their contrasting attitudes, the colours proper to each, and an infinity of details as regards the scene, which are missing from a description already too extensive, though I have sought to make it as brief as possible; yet it was necessary in order to acquaint you with this comedy troupe that had penetrated, so unexpectedly, the solitude of the manor of Sigognac.
The meal commenced in silence; great appetites are mute like great passions! But, the first pangs of hunger appeased, tongues were loosened. The young Baron, who perhaps had not dined adequately since the day he was weaned, although possessed by the greatest longing in the world to appear an amorous and romantic figure before Serafina and Isabella, ate, or rather devoured, the meal with an ardour that would not have aroused the slightest suspicion that he had already eaten. The Pedant, amused by this youthful hunger, heaped partridge-wings and slices of ham onto the lord of Sigognac’s plate, which disappeared as swiftly as snowflakes on a red-hot shovel. Beelzebub, in transports of gluttony, had determined, despite his fears, to leave the unassailable post he occupied on the cornice of the dresser, and had concluded, triumphantly, that it would be hard for any of the troupe to tug at his ears, since he possessed none, and that none of them could indulge in the vulgar jest of shining a saucepan on his rear end, since his missing tail prohibited such an act, one more worthy of rogues than decent folk, as the guests gathered around this table, laden with dishes of unusual succulence and fragrance, seemed to be. He had approached, taking advantage of the shadows, and so flat to the ground that the joints of his front legs formed angles above his head, like a black panther stalking a gazelle, without anyone having paid any attention to him. Having reached the Baron’s chair, he had reverted to his normal stance, and, so as to attract the attention of his master, plucked a tune on his knee with his ten claws as if playing a guitar. Sigognac, indulgent to this humble friend who had suffered so long from lack of nourishment in his service, allowed him to share in his good fortune by passing him bones and leftovers under the table, which were received with frantic gratitude. Miraut, for his part, who had managed to enter the banqueting hall behind Pierre, also received more than one good morsel.
Life seemed to have returned to this dead dwelling; there was light, warmth, and noise. The actresses, having drunk two fingers of wine, chattered away like parakeets on their perches, and complimented each other on their mutual successes. The Pedant and the Tyrant disputed over the superiority of theatrical comedy or tragedy; the one maintaining that it was harder to make honest people laugh than to frighten them with nursery tales whose only merit was their antiquity; the other claiming that the scurrility and buffoonery employed by the makers of comedies greatly debased the author. Leander had taken a small mirror from his pocket and was gazing at himself with as much complacency as the long-dead Narcissus viewing his reflection in the water. Contrary to Leander’s custom, he was not in love with Isabella; he aimed higher. He hoped, by means of his grace and gentlemanly manners, to catch the eye of some rich and readily-moved widow, whose four-horse carriage would arrive to collect him at the stage door, and carry him off to some château, where the susceptible beauty would await him, dressed in the most charming of negligées, seated in front of a most delightful feast. Had this vision ever been realised? Leander affirmed it... Scapin denied it, and it was the subject of endless disputes between them. Scapin, that accursed valet, as malicious as a monkey, claimed that poor Leander had fluttered his eyes, cast murderous glances at the boxes, laughed so as to show his thirty-two teeth, stretched his hamstrings, arched his waist, passed a small comb through the hair of his wig, and changed his linen for each performance, even though he had been forced to skip lunch to pay the laundress, but had not yet managed to make the least baroness, even one of forty-five years or more, afflicted with rosacea, and adorned with an incipient moustache, yearn for his presence.
Scapin, seeing Leander absorbed in contemplation, had cunningly raised the subject again, and the furious beau had offered to fetch from his luggage a chest filled with love-letters smelling of musk and benzoin, sent to him by a host of ladies of quality, countesses, marchionesses, baronesses, all madly in love with him, which was not merely boasting on his part, since the weakness of yielding to actors and musicians was common enough given the loose morals of the time. Serafina said that if she were one of these ladies, she would have Leander whipped, for his impertinence and indiscretion; while Isabella swore, in jest, that if he did not show a little more modesty, she would decidedly not wed him at the end of the play. Sigognac, though he was too embarrassed to say a word, and only uttered vague phrases, greatly admired Isabella, and his eyes spoke where his tongue could not. The young girl had noticed the effect she had produced on the young Baron, and responded with a few languid glances, to the great displeasure of Matamore, who was secretly in love with her, though devoid of hope, given his grotesque role. Another youth more adept, and more audacious, than Sigognac would have pursued his suit; but our poor Baron in his dilapidated castle had not been able to acquire the fine manners of the Court, and though he lacked neither learning nor wit, he appeared somewhat stupid at that moment.
The half-score bottles had been religiously emptied, the Pedant toppling the last one, having drunk the last drop; this gesture was understood by Matamore, who went off to the wagon to fetch more. The Baron, though he was already a little tipsy, could not refrain from raising a glass, full to the brim, to the princesses’ health, which completed the process.
The Pedant and the Tyrant drank like accomplished tipplers, who, if they are not completely in control of themselves, are nonetheless never completely intoxicated; Matamore was sober in the Spanish manner, and would have lived like those hidalgos who dine on three ripe olives, and drink the melody on a mandolin. There was a reason for this frugality: he feared, by eating and drinking too much, to lose the phenomenal leanness which was his best comic device. If he grew fat, his role would be diminished, thus he could only survive as an actor in a state of starvation, was in a perpetual trance, and often glanced at the buckle of his belt to make sure that he had not, by some mischance, grown fatter since the day before. A voluntary Tantalus, this abstemious actor, a martyr to leanness,
a self-dissected anatomy, only touched food with the tips of his teeth, and if he had only dedicated his fasting to a pious purpose like Saint Anthony of Egypt, or Saint Macarius, he would have been destined for paradise. The Duenna gulped down solids and liquids in a formidable manner; her flabby jowls, and dewlaps trembling at every motion of her well-stocked jaws. As for Serafina and Isabella, neither having a fan to hand, they yawned as best they could, behind the diaphanous rampart of their pretty fingers. Sigognac, although a little dizzy from the fumes of wine, noted this and said to them:
— ‘Ladies, I see that you are longing for sleep, though civility makes you fight against it. I would love to be able to grant you each an apartment with a dressing-room and a closet, but my poor castle is falling to ruin like my ancestral line of which I am the last representative... however, I give my own room over to you, the only one more or less free of damp; you will both be comfortable there with madame; the bed is large, and night soon over. These gentlemen will stay here, and will make do with the armchairs and benches... above all, do not be frightened by the rippling tapestry, nor the wind moaning in the fireplace, nor the scuffling of mice; I can assure you that, though the place is rather gloomy, no ghosts make themselves at home here.’
— ‘I play Bradamante (a warrior-maid in the ‘Orlando Innamorato’ of Matteo Boiardo, and its sequel the ‘Orlando Furioso’ of Ludovico Ariosto) and am no coward. I will reassure our timid Isabella,’ said Serafina, laughing; ‘as for our Duenna, she is a bit of a witch, and if the Devil comes, he’ll have someone to talk with.’
Sigognac took a light, and led the ladies into the bedroom, which seemed to them, indeed, quite fantastical in appearance, as the wavering lamp, agitated by the wind, made bizarre shadows flicker over the beams of the ceiling, such that monstrous forms seemed to crouch in the unlit corners.
— ‘This would make an excellent set for the fifth act of a tragedy,’ said Serafina, looking about her, while Isabella could not suppress a shiver, half from cold, half from terror, at feeling herself enveloped in an atmosphere of darkness and dampness. The three females slipped under the covers without undressing. Isabella placed herself between Serafina and the Duenna so that if the furry paw of some ghostly creature, or the hand of an incubus, emerged from beneath the bed, it would first encounter one of her comrades. The two brave souls soon fell asleep, but the timid young girl remained for a long time with her eyes open and fixed on the closed door, as if she had sensed a world of ghosts and nocturnal terror beyond. The door remained shut, however, nor did any ghosts emerge, dressed in shrouds, or rattling their chains, though strange noises were sometimes heard in the other empty rooms; and sleep finally threw its gilded dust over the eyelids of the fearful Isabella, and soon her even breathing joined the more accentuated sighs of her companions.
The Pedant was fast asleep, his nose on the table, opposite the Tyrant, who was snoring like an organ pipe and muttering, dreamily, a few hemistichs of alexandrines. Captain Matamore, the Braggart, his head resting on the edge of an armchair and his feet stretched out on the firedogs, had rolled himself up in his grey cape and looked like a herring wrapped in paper. To avoid disturbing his curls, Leander held his head upright, and slumbered soundly. Sigognac had settled himself in a vacant armchair, but the events of the evening had agitated him too much for him to be able to sleep.
Two young women do not burst into the life of a young man without troubling it, especially when the said young man has lived till then a sad, chaste, and isolated life, deprived of the amusements of youth by that harsh stepmother named Poverty.
It might be thought unlikely a boy of twenty could have lived without a love affair of some kind; but Sigognac was proud, and, being unable to present himself in the manner appropriate to his rank and lineage, he had remained at home. His parents, whose help he could have called on without incurring any shame, were dead. Each day he had sunk deeper into retirement, and oblivion. He had indeed sometimes, during his solitary walks, met Yolande de Foix, mounted on her white mare, hunting the deer with her father, and the young noblemen of the neighbourhood. The gleaming vision of her often traversed his dreams; but what connection could be hoped for between that rich and beautiful lady, and himself, a poor, ruined, melancholy squire? Far from seeking to attract her attention, he had, during such meetings, withdrawn as much as possible, not wishing to be laughed at on account of his pitifully dented felt hat with its rat-eaten plume, his faded and over-large clothes, and his old unwarlike steed, more suitable to serve as a mount for a country priest than a gentleman; for nothing is sadder, for a true heart, than to appear ridiculous in the eyes of whoever it loves, and he had reasoned with himself, so as to stifle his nascent passion, employing all the arguments poverty inspires. Had he succeeded? … I cannot say. He believed so, at least, and had rejected his thoughts as mere chimeras; he found himself miserable enough, without adding to his cares the torments of unrequited love.
The night passed without incident except for Isabella taking fright at the sight of Beelzebub, who had curled up on her chest, like Smarra (see the tale ‘Smarra ou les Démons de la Nuit’, 1821, by Charles Nodier), and would not be moved, finding his cushion very soft.
‘The night passed without incident except for Isabella taking fright at the sight of Beelzebub’
As for Sigognac, his eyes scarcely closed, either because he was not used to sleeping away from his own bed, or because the proximity of those pretty women exercised his brain. I prefer to think that a vague project was beginning to take shape in his mind, and that was what kept him awake, and perplexed. The arrival of these actors seemed to him a stroke of fate, almost like an embassy from Fortune inviting him to leave this feudal hovel where his life was mouldering away in the shadows, profitlessly wasted.
‘As for Sigognac, his eyes scarcely closed’
Day was beginning to break, and already bluish glimmers filtering through the leaded windows made the light of the foundering lamps appear a livid, sickly yellow. The faces of the sleepers were illuminated strangely by these dual sources of light, and striped with their different colours, like surcoats of the Middle Ages. Leander took on the tones of a yellow candle, and resembled those wax statues of Saint John in a silk wig, whose rouge has faded despite the glass dome covering it. Matamore, his eyes tightly closed, his cheekbones prominent, his jaw muscles tense, his nose tapered as if it had been pinched by the thin fingers of death, resembled a corpse. Violent blushes and apoplectic patches marbled the face of the Pedant; the rubies of his nose had changed to amethysts, and on his thick lips the blue flower of wine blossomed. A few drops of sweat, threading the ravines and counterscarps of his forehead, had been halted at his bushy and grizzled eyebrows; his flabby cheeks hung flaccidly. The daze produced by heavy sleep rendered hideous that face which, awake and invigorated by the spirit, seemed jovial; leaning thus on the edge of the table, the Pedant looked like an old satyr, felled by debauchery, at the side of a ditch, following a bacchanal. The Tyrant, he of the pallid face and black beard was still quite composed; his visage, that of a good-natured Hercules, or paternalistic executioner scarcely ever altered. The Soubrette also bore the daylight’s indiscreet visitation quite well; she was relatively unmarred by it. Her eyes, ringed by slightly browner bruises, her cheeks, displaying a little purplish marbling, alone betrayed the fatigue of a poor night’s sleep. A lewd ray of sunlight, slipping amongst the empty bottles, half-full glasses, and the remains of the meal, caressed the young girl’s chin and mouth, like a faun teasing a sleeping nymph. The chaste dowagers of the tapestry, with their bilious complexions, sought to blush beneath their varnish, at the sight of their retreat, now violated by this gypsy encampment, for the banqueting hall presented an aspect at once sinister and grotesque.
The maid awoke first under the kiss of morning light; she stood on her little feet, shook her skirts as a bird shakes its plumage, ran the palms of her hands over her hair to tidy it, and, seeing the Baron de Sigognac seated in his armchair, his eyes clear as those of a basilisk (a monster of fable whose gaze was fatal), she went to his side, and greeted him with a pretty comedic bow.
— ‘I regret,’ said Sigognac, returning the Soubrette’s greeting, ‘that the state of disrepair of this house, more suited to ghosts than the living, prevents me from receiving you in a more fitting manner; I would have wished you to rest between Holland sheets and beneath a curtain of Indian damask, instead of leaving you to languish on this worm-eaten chair.’
— ‘Regret nothing, sir,’ replied the Soubrette; ‘if it were not for you, we would have spent the night in our wagon, stuck in the mire, shivering amidst the pouring rain, and morning would have found us in a dreadful state. Moreover, these lodgings that you disdain are magnificent compared to the barns, open to all the winds, in which we are often obliged to sleep, with bales of straw for beds, whether Tyrants or subjects, princes or princesses, Leanders or maids, in our life as actors wandering from town to town.’
While the Baron and the Soubrette exchanged these pleasantries, the Pedant crashed to the ground amidst a pile of broken wood. His chair, weary of bearing him, had come apart, and the fat fellow, stretched out with legs bent, was struggling like an upturned tortoise, uttering inarticulate sounds. In his fall, he had caught, blindly, at the edge of the tablecloth, and caused a cascade of dishes whose remnants returned upon him. The crash woke the whole company, with a start. The Tyrant, after stretching his arms and rubbing his eyes, extended a helping hand to the old comic actor and set him on his feet.
— ‘Such an accident would never happen to Scapin,’ said the Tyrant, with a sort of cavernous grunt that served as a laugh; ‘he could fall into a spider’s web without breaking it.’
— ‘That’s true,’ Scapin, thus challenged, replied, unfolding his long limbs, articulated like the legs of a crane-fly ‘not everyone has the advantage of being a Polyphemus (the one-eyed Cyclops of Greek myth), a Cacus (the fire-breathing giant slain by Hercules), a mountain of flesh and bones like you, nor a wine-sack, a two-legged barrel, like Blazius here.’
The uproar brought Isabella, Serafina and the Duenna to the threshold. These two young women, though a little tired and pale, were still charming in the light of day. They seemed to Sigognac the most radiant young ladies in the world, though a meticulous observer might have found something to improve upon in their slightly wrinkled and faded elegance; but what matter a few faded ribbons, a few frayed and shimmering strips of fabric, a few mishaps and incongruities of dress, when those who wear them are young and pretty? Besides, the Baron’s eyes, accustomed to the sight of aged, dusty, faded, and dilapidated objects, were incapable of discerning such trifles. Serafina and Isabella seemed to him superbly attired in the midst of his sinister castle, where everything was sliding into disrepair. Their graceful figures invoked the sensations of a dream.
As for the Duenna, thanks to her age, she enjoyed the privilege of immutable ugliness; nothing could alter that physiognomy of carved boxwood, in which owl eyes shone. Sunlight or candlelight was a matter of indifference to her.
At this moment, Pierre entered, bent on tidying the room, adding wood to the fire, in which a few burnt embers whitened under a plush robe, and clearing the remains of the feast, always so unpleasant once one’s hunger has been sated.
The flames in the hearth, licking at a cast-iron plaque bearing the Sigognac coat of arms, which was unaccustomed to such caresses, drew the whole comedic troupe into a circle, illuminating it with its bright glow. A clear, blazing fire is always pleasant after a night that, if not sleepless, has proved gloomy, and the discomfort betrayed on their faces by their grimaces, and more or less visible bruises, vanished completely, thanks to its beneficial influence. Isabella held out the palms of her hands, tinted with pink reflections, towards the fireplace, and, vermilioned by this light rouge, her pallor was unnoticeable. Donna Serafina, taller and more robust, stood behind her, like an older sister who, less tired, permits her younger sister to sit. As for Scapin, perched on one of his heron-like legs, he was half-dreaming like a water bird at the edge of a marsh, his beak in his crop, his foot tucked under his belly. Blazius, the Pedant, running his tongue over his lips, raised the bottles one after the other to see if there were still a few drops left.
The young Baron had taken Pierre aside to find out if a few dozen eggs could be obtained in the village to feed the actors, or a few chickens whose necks could be wrung, and the old servant had slipped away to carry out the commission as swiftly as possible, the troupe having expressed their intention of leaving early, to cover a large distance yet not arrive too late in the evening.
— ‘Lunch will be inadequate, I’m afraid,’ said Sigognac to his guests, ‘and you’ll have to be content with a Pythagorean (vegetarian) repast; but still, better a mediocre lunch than no lunch at all, and there isn’t a single tavern or eating-house within twenty miles. The state of this castle tells you I’m not rich, but, as my poverty results from the expenses my ancestors incurred in war, on behalf of royalty, I have nothing to be ashamed of.’
— ‘No, indeed not, sir,’ replied the Tyrant, in his bass voice, ‘and many who boast of their wealth would doubtless be embarrassed to name its source. The merchant dresses in cloth of gold, and the nobility have holes in their cloaks, but through those holes honour shines.’
— ‘What astonishes me,’ added Blazius, the Pedant, ‘is that an accomplished gentleman, such as this gentleman seems to be, should let his youth be wasted thus, in the depths of solitude, where Fortune is unlikely to find him, however much she may wish to do so; if she passed by this castle, whose style of architecture was all very well two hundred years ago, she would go on her way, thinking it uninhabited. Monsieur le Baron should go to Paris, the central eye of the world, the meeting place of fine bold minds, the Eldorado of the Spaniards in France, the Canaan of the Jews amidst its Christians, the blessed land illuminated by the rays of the Court’s sunlight. There, he would not fail to be recognised according to his merit, and to rise, either by attaching himself to some great person, or by performing some brilliant action for which an opportunity would infallibly be found.’
The words of the good man, despite his comically exaggerated phrasing which was the involuntary result of his role as the Pedant, were not without weight. Sigognac felt their accuracy, and had often said to himself, during his long wanderings on the moor, the words Blazius now spoke aloud.
Yet he lacked the money to undertake so long a journey, and knew not know how to obtain any. Though brave, he was proud, and more fearful of a mocking smile than a sword thrust. Without being well informed about fashion, he felt ridiculous in his dilapidated gear, already ancient in the last reign. According to the way of those rendered timid by penury, he took no count of the positive aspects of his situation, and saw it only in the negative. Perhaps he might have enlisted the help of some of his father’s old friends by cultivating them a little, but it was not in his nature to do so, and he would sooner have died seated on an empty chest, chewing on a toothpick like a Spanish hidalgo, beneath his coat of arms than request a gift or loan. He was one of those who, with an empty stomach seated before an excellent dinner, to consume which they have been invited, pretend to have dined already, for fear of being suspected of hunger.
— ‘I have thought about it on occasions,’ he said, ‘but lack friends in Paris, and the descendants of those who knew my family when it was richer and held office at court, will care little for a gaunt, thin Sigognac, arriving crow-like, with open beak and empty claws, from the summit of his ruined tower, to share in the common prey. And then, I know not why I should blush to say it, I have no decent clothing, and so could not appear on a footing worthy of my name; I know not how, I could reach Paris even by combining my meagre resources with those of Pierre.’
— ‘But you are not obliged,’ replied Blazius, ‘to enter the capital triumphantly, like a Roman Caesar mounted on a chariot, drawn by a quadriga of white horses. If our humble ox-wagon is not beneath the pride of your lordship, come to Paris with us, since that is where our troupe is headed. There is one who shines there now who made his entrance on foot, with his bundle tied to the end of his rapier, and holding his shoes in his hand for fear of wearing them out.’
A faint blush coloured Sigognac’s cheekbones, a blush half of shame, half of pleasure. If, on the one hand, his ancestral pride rebelled at the idea of being obliged to a mere actor, on the other, his natural kindness of heart was touched by an offer, frankly made, which corresponded so well to his secret longing. He feared, moreover, that if he refused Blazius, he would wound the actor’s pride, and perhaps miss an opportunity that would never present itself again. Doubtless, the thought of the last descendant of the Sigognacs riding in the chariot of Thespis with nomadic histrions had something shocking about it, which ought to make the armorial unicorns neigh and the red-tongued lions roar, yet, after all, the young Baron had sulked long enough, contrary to his true desire, behind his feudal walls.
He was hovering, uncertain whether to say yes or no, and inwardly weighing those two decisive monosyllables, when Isabella, advancing with a graceful air, and placing herself before the Baron and The Pedant, Blazius, uttered these words which put an end to the young man’s doubts:
— ‘Since our former poet, having inherited a fortune, has quit the company, Monsieur le Baron could replace him, for I found, unintentionally, while opening a copy of Ronsard’s verse, which was on the table near his bed, a sonnet, marked with erasures, which must be of his own composition; he could amend our roles, making the necessary additions and deletions, and, if needs be, write a piece on a subject we could suggest. I have, in fact, an Italian plot outlined, in which there would be a fine role for myself, if someone would but give the thing some polish.’
As she said this, Isabella cast such a tender, penetrating look at Sigognac, that he could not resist it. The arrival of Pierre, bringing a large bacon omelette, and a fairly respectable quarter of ham, interrupted her remarks. The whole party took their places round the table and began to eat with an appetite. As for Sigognac, he touched, as a pure formality, the dishes placed before him; his customary sobriety was not capable of indulging in a meal so close to the previous one, and, besides, his mind was preoccupied in several ways.
Their repast over, and while the cowherd was twisting the straps of the yoke around his oxen’s horns, Isabella and Serafina had the fancy of descending to the garden, which could be seen from the courtyard.
— ‘I greatly fear,’ said Sigognac, offering them his hand to help them negotiate the loose, moss-covered steps, ‘that you may leave some shreds of your dress in the clutches of those brambles, for though there is no rose without thorns, as they say, there are, on the other hand, a host of thorns lacking a rose.’
The young Baron said the words in that tone of melancholy irony which was customary with him, when alluding to his poverty; but, as if the garden, having been belittled, prided itself on its honour, two small briar-roses, their cluster of five petals half-opening around the yellow pistils, suddenly gleamed from a transverse branch barring the path of the young women. Sigognac picked them, and gallantly offered them to Isabella and Serafina, saying: ‘I had not thought my garden so full of flowers; only weeds normally grow here, and the only bouquets one can make are of nettles and hemlock; it is you who have made these two little flowers bloom, and smile on a scene of desolation, like poetry among the ruins.’
‘I had not thought my garden so full of flowers’
Isabella carefully tucked the eglantine (rosa canina) into her bodice, giving the young man a long, grateful look to demonstrate the value she attached to the little gift. Serafina, chewing the stem of her flower, held the petals to her mouth, as if to force their pale pink to compete with the carnation of her lips.
They progressed to the statue of the mythological divinity whose ghostly form was outlined at the end of the path, Sigognac pushing aside the foliage that might otherwise have marred the faces of his guests as they passed. The young ingénue looked with a sort of tender interest at this fallow garden so in harmony with the ruined château. She thought of the sad hours that Sigognac must have spent in this abode of ennui, misery, and solitude, his forehead pressed against the windowpane, his eyes fixed on the deserted path, with no other company than a black cat and a white-haired dog. Serafina’s stronger features expressed only cold disdain masked by politeness; she definitely found this gentleman far too poor, although she had a certain respect for titled folk.
— ‘This is where my domain ends,’ said the Baron, arriving at the rocky niche where Pomona, if it were she, stood mouldering. ‘Formerly, the terrain as far as the eye can see from the top of these dilapidated turrets, hill and plain, field and heath, belonged to my ancestors; and now I own just enough to await the hour when the last of the Sigognacs will join his ancestors in the family vault, it being then our sole possession.’
— ‘You are very gloomy, you know, so early in the morning?’ replied Isabella, touched by her own thought, and assuming a cheerful air to dissipate the air of sadness clouding Sigognac’s brow. Fortune is a woman, and, though she is said to be blind, she sometimes distinguishes, from the height of her wheel, a knight, in the crowd, of birth and merit; it is only a matter of placing oneself in her path. Come, make up your mind, join us, and perhaps, in a few years’ time, the turrets of Sigognac, restored and whitewashed, and topped with new slates, will cut as proud a figure then as now they make a pitiful one; and besides, it would sadden me to leave you in this mansion fit only for owls,’ she added in a low voice, low enough so that Serafina could not hear her.
The soft light that shone in Isabella’s eyes triumphed over the Baron’s reluctance. The attraction of it being a gallant adventure offset in his own eyes the humiliating aspect of the journey. It was nothing unusual to follow an actress out of love for her, and harness oneself as a suitor to the comedic chariot; the finest horseman would not have scrupled. The quiver-bearing god Amor obliges even gods and heroes to engage willingly in a thousand bizarre actions and disguises: Jupiter took the form of a bull to seduce Europa; Hercules spun his distaff at Omphale’s feet; Aristotle, that prudent man, scrambled about on all fours, carrying his wife on his back, she wishing to pursue philosophy (a charming display of horsemanship!); all of which were things contrary to divine or human dignity. Was Sigognac in love with Isabella? He did not seek to pursue the matter further, but felt that he would henceforth experience dreadful sadness were he to remain in his château, which had been so enlivened for an instant by the presence of this young and graceful being.
So, he swiftly made up his mind, asked the actors to wait a little and, taking Pierre aside, confided his intention to him. That faithful servant, whatever he felt about being separated from his master, was only too aware himself of the disadvantages of remaining at Sigognac. He had watched, with regret, the young man fading away in dull repose and indolent sadness, and though a troupe of players seemed a singular retinue for a lord of Sigognac, he still preferred his master’s means of seeking a better fate, to the profound atony which, for the last two or three years in particular, had overcome the young Baron. He had soon filled a trunk with the few belongings his master possessed, gathered in a leather purse the few pistoles scattered in the drawers of the old chest, to all of which he took care to add, without a word, his humble savings, a modest act of devotion which the Baron would doubtless fail to note, for Pierre, in addition to the various roles he performed at the castle, also occupied that of treasurer, somewhat of a sinecure.
The white horse was saddled, for Sigognac did not wish to mount the actors’ wagon till he was at least half a dozen miles from the castle, so as to conceal his departure; he thus appeared to be only escorting his guests; Pierre was obliged to follow on foot, in order to return the mount to the stable.
The oxen were beneath the yoke and, despite its weight, were attempting to raise their damp, black muzzles, from which hung filaments of silvery saliva; the red and yellow esparto-reed tiaras which they were wearing, and the white linen caparisons enveloping them like shirts to protect them from fly-bites, gave them a most Mithraic and majestic air. Standing in front of them, the ox-driver, a tall, tanned, rustic fellow like a shepherd from the countryside around Rome, was leaning on the shaft of his goad, in a pose which recalled, unknowingly, that of the Greek heroes on ancient bas-reliefs. Isabella and Serafina seated themselves at the front of the chariot to enjoy a view of the landscape; The Duenna, the Pedant, and Leander occupied the rear, more interested in continuing their slumber than admiring the moorland perspective. All was ready; the drover touched his animals, who lowered their heads, braced themselves on their lumpy legs, and plodded forward; the wagon moved, the boards groaned, the inadequately- greased wheels squealed, and the porch’s vaulting echoed to the heavy tramp of the team. They were away.
During these preparations, Beelzebub and Miraut, realizing that something unusual was happening, paced back and forth with a frightened and anxious air, searching their limited brains to understand the presence of so many people in a place ordinarily so deserted. The dog ran vaguely from Pierre to his master, questioning both with his bluish-eyed gaze, and growling at the strangers. The cat, more reflective, sniffed the wheels cautiously, and examined the imposing mass of the oxen from a little further off. They, with an unexpected movement of their horns, made him jump backwards in a prudent manner; then he went and sat, facing the old white horse with whom he seemed to communicate, and of whom he seemed to ask a question. The kindly steed bent his head towards the cat, who raised his own, and moving his grey lips bristling with long hair, doubtless as it ground away at some bit of fodder stuck between his aged teeth, seemed truly to be speaking to his feline friend. What was he saying? Democritus alone, who was said to be capable of understanding the language of animals, could have understood him. Whatever it was, Beelzebub, after this silent conversation, which he communicated to Miraut with a few blinks of the eyes, and two or three short, plaintive cries, seemed sure of the reason for all this commotion. When the Baron was in the saddle and had gathered the reins, Miraut took the right, and Beelzebub the left, of his horse, and the Lord of Sigognac left his ancestral castle between the dog and the cat. For the prudent tomcat to have adopted this bold approach, so unusual for his race, he must have divined some supreme resolution on his master’s part.
As he was about to leave the sad dwelling, Sigognac felt deep heart-ache. He scanned once more those walls, black with decay, green with moss, every stone of which was familiar to him; those towers with their rusty weathervanes which he had contemplated during so many tedious hours, with that fixed and distracted gaze which sees nothing; the windows of those devastated rooms which he had wandered through like the ghost in an accursed house, almost afraid of the sound of his own footsteps; that uncultivated garden where toads crawled on the damp earth, where snakes slithered among the brambles; that chapel with its collapsed roof, its crumbling arches which blocked with rubble the greenish flagstones beneath which his dead parents lay side by side, an imposing image, as vague as the memory of a dream, barely glimpsed in childhood. He thought also of the portraits in the gallery which had accompanied his solitude, and had smiled for twenty years with their immoveable smiles; of the hunter of young duck, who graced the tapestry; of his four poster-bed, whose pillow he had so often wet with his tears; all these old, wretched, dreary, dusty, gloomy, somnolent things, which had inspired in him so much disgust and ennui, now seemed to him full of a charm which he had previously failed to recognise. He felt ungrateful towards the poor old dilapidated château which had nonetheless sheltered him as best it could, and had, despite its decrepitude, remained stubbornly upright so as not to crush him in its fall, like an octogenarian servant who stands on his trembling legs as long as his master is present; a thousand bitter-sweet memories, a thousand sad pleasures, a thousand moments of quiet melancholy came back to him; habit, that slow, pale companion of life, seated on the familiar threshold, turned towards him eyes drowned in a gloomy tenderness, murmuring in a faint yet irresistible voice a refrain from childhood, a refrain uttered by his nurse, and it seemed to him, as he traversed the porch, that an invisible hand was pulling at his coat, to draw him back. As he emerged from the doorway, preceding the wagon, a gust of wind brought a fresh smell of rain-washed heather, a sweet and penetrating aroma of his native countryside; a distant bell tinkled, and its silvery vibrations arrived on the wings of the same breeze as the scent of the moors. It was all too much, and Sigognac, seized by profound nostalgia, though he was barely a few steps from home, made a movement as if to turn back; the old horse was already bending his neck in the direction indicated with more agility than his age seemed to allow; Miraut and Beelzebub simultaneously raised their heads, as if aware of their master’s feelings, and halting their forward march, fixed their questioning eyes on him. But this part-reversal had a result quite different from that which might have been expected, for it caused Sigognac’s gaze to meet that of Isabella, and the young girl charged hers with such caressing languor, and such a mute yet intelligible prayer, that the Baron felt himself turn pale and blush; he completely forgot his manor’s cracked walls, the scent of the heather, and the sound of the bell, which nevertheless still continued its melancholy call; rather he gave a sudden tug at the bridle, and urged his horse onwards with a light pressure from his calves. The battle was over; Isabella had conquered.
The wagon set off along the road mentioned previously, causing frogs to leap from the waterlogged ruts in fear. Once they had reached the road, and the oxen, then on drier ground, were able to move, albeit slowly, the heavy cart to which they were harnessed, Sigognac moved from the vanguard to the rearguard, not wishing to show too assiduous an attention towards Isabella, and perhaps also to abandon himself more freely to the thoughts that were stirring his soul.
The château’s pepper-pot towers were already half hidden behind clumps of trees; the Baron raised himself in his saddle to catch sight of them again, and, in lowering his eyes to the ground, saw Miraut and Beelzebub, whose doleful faces expressed all the pain that creatures can show. Miraut, taking advantage of the pause necessitated by this contemplation of the castle’s turrets, stretched out his stiff and aged legs, and tried to jump up to his master’s face, in order to lick him one last time. Sigognac, guessing the poor creature’s intention, seized him at the level of his boot, by the overly wide skin of his neck, drew him onto the pommel of his saddle, and kissed Miraut’s black, nose, rough like a truffle, without trying to escape the wet caress with which the grateful animal polished his moustache. During this scene, Beelzebub, more agile, and with the help of his as yet sharp claws, had climbed Sigognac’s boot and thigh, on the other side, and presented his black, hairless head at the level of the saddle-bow, purring formidably and rolling his large yellow eyes; he also begged a mark of farewell. The young Baron passed his hand two or three times over the cat’s head, which the animal raised, pushing itself forward to better enjoy the kindly attention. I trust that my hero will not be mocked, if I say that the humble proofs of affection given by these creatures supposedly deprived of soul, but not lacking in feeling, made him experience a strange emotion, and that twin tears, rising from his heart with a sob, fell on the heads of Miraut and Beelzebub, and baptised them ‘friends’ of their master, in the human sense of the term.
The pair watched for some time, after Sigognac had put his mount to a trot, so as to join the wagon; then, having lost sight of him at a bend in the road, they fraternally returned to the manor.
The night’s storm had left no trace of the heavy downpours on the sandy terrain of the moors, as it does on less arid soil; the landscape, merely refreshed, offered a kind of rustic beauty. The heather, cleaned of its layer of dust by the rain from above, burgeoned with little gleaming purple buds at the edge of the embankments. Golden flowers on the bright green gorse swayed; aquatic plants spread over the brimming pools; the pines themselves shook their dark foliage less funereally, and gave off a resinous scent; spirals of bluish smoke rose gaily from the heart of a clump of chestnut-trees betraying the habitation of some tenant farmer; and on the undulations of the plain, rolling like waves, as far as the eye could see, various marks indicated scattered groups of sheep, being guarded by some shepherd dreaming on his stilts (the stilt-walking shepherds were a traditional feature of the tangled moors and heaths of Les Landes). On the edge of the horizon, like archipelagos of white cloud shaded with azure, appeared the distant peaks of the Pyrenees, half-blurred by the light vapours of the autumn morning.
Sometimes the road was hollowed out between two escarpments whose crumbling sides revealed nothing but white sand, like powdered sandstone, and which bore on their summits a mop of brushwood, tangled filaments whipping the canvas of the wagon as it passed. In some places the ground was so soft that it had been necessary to line it with fir trunks laid transversely, causing the cart to jolt and the actresses to utter little cries. At other times it was necessary to cross, over unstable culverts, pools of stagnant water and streams that obstructed the path. At each perilous spot, Sigognac helped the Duenna and Isabella, more timid or less lazy than Serafina, to descend from the carriage. As for the Tyrant and Blazius the Pedant they slumbered without a care, tossed about between the trunks, like folk who had experienced it all before. Scapin walked beside the wagon to maintain, through exercise, his phenomenal thinness, of which he took the greatest care, and seeing him from a distance raising his long legs, one would have taken him for a reaper walking amidst the wheat. He took such enormous strides that he was often obliged to stop to wait for the rest of the troop, having acquired in his role, the habit of carrying his hip forward, and walking with his legs wide as a compass, he could not shake this gait either in the city or in the country, and only took giant steps.
Ox-carts travel slowly, especially on the moors, where the wheels are sometimes plunged in sand up to the hubs, and where the roads are distinguishable from the wasteland only by a pair of ruts a foot or two deep; and although those brave beasts, bending their sinewy necks, pushed forward bravely, urged on by the ox-driver’s goad, the sun had already risen high above the horizon before they had travelled five miles; country miles, it is true, which are as long as a day without dining, and similar to the miles that, after a fortnight or so, would surely have been marked out by those amorous couples charged by King Pharamond, according to Rabelais (see ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’, Book 2: XXXIII), with setting up milestones in France. The peasants who crossed the road, burdened by a bundle of grass or sticks, became fewer in number, and the moor displayed a desolate bareness as wild as a despoblado (wilderness) in Spain or the American pampas. Sigognac, judging it useless to tire his poor old mount further, leapt down, and threw the reins to Pierre, whose swarthy features revealed through twenty layers of tan the pallor of a deep emotion. The moment of separation between master and servant had arrived, a painful moment, for Pierre had witnessed Sigognac’s birth, and fulfilled the role of a humble friend rather than that of a valet to the Baron.
— ‘May God guide your lordship,’ said Pierre, bowing over the hand the Baron extended to him, ‘and raise up the line of the Sigognacs; I regret that Fortune does not permit me to accompany you.’
— ‘What would I do with you, my poor Pierre, in this as yet unknown life I am about to enter? With so few resources, I cannot burden fate with the care of both our existences. At the château, you will always be able to keep alive, more or less; our old tenant farmers would never let their master’s faithful servant die of hunger. Besides, we must not bar the doors of Sigognac, and abandon it to the owls and snakes, as if were a mere hovel, visited by death and haunted by ghosts; the soul of that ancient dwelling still lives within me, and, as long as I shall live, there will be a guardian there to stop the village children aiming their sling-stones at our coat of arms.’
Pierre nodded, for his religion, like that of all old servants attached to noble families, was embodied in the seigneurial manor, and Sigognac, despite its wretched state of dilapidation, still seemed to him one of the finest castles in the world.
— ‘Moreover,’ added the Baron, smiling, ‘who would look after Bayard, Miraut and Beelzebub?’
— ‘True, master,’ replied Pierre; and he seized the bridle of Bayard, his master’s steed, whose neck Sigognac was slapping with the palm of his hand by way of a caress and a farewell.
As he parted from his master, the good horse neighed several times, and Sigognac, for a long while, could still hear the affectionate sounds uttered by the grateful beast, weakened though they were by distance.
Sigognac, once alone, experienced the sensation people feel at embarkation, when leaving their friends behind on shore; it is perhaps the bitterest moment of any departure; the world in which one has lived recedes, and one hastens to rejoin one’s travelling companions, so sad and destitute does the heart feel, and so greatly does one require the sight of a human face: thus, the young man lengthened his stride, so as to rejoin the wagon which rolled on painfully slowly, the sand squeaking beneath its wheels which traced furrows like ploughshares as they progressed.
Seeing Sigognac alongside the wagon, Isabella complained of being seated uncomfortably, and said that she wished to descend and stretch her legs a little, though in reality possessed by the charitable intention of not leaving the young lord prey to melancholy, but distracting him with cheerful conversation.
The veil of sadness that covered Sigognac’s face parted like a cloud traversed by a ray of sunlight, when the young girl asked for the support of his arm, so as to walk a few paces along the road, which was smooth at that spot.
They were walking close together thus, Isabella reciting to Sigognac a few lines from one of her roles, which she was unhappy with and which she wanted him to rework, when a hunting-horn suddenly emitted a burst of sound from a thicket on the right of the road; the branches parted before the chests of the horses as they felled the saplings; and young Yolande de Foix appeared in the centre of the road, in all the splendour of Diana the huntress. The excitement of the hunt had brought a richer colour to her cheeks, her nostrils quivered, and her heart beat more rapidly beneath the velvet and gold of her bodice. A few snagged threads in her long skirt, a few scratches on her horse’s flanks, proved that the intrepid Amazon feared neither thickets nor undergrowth. Though the noble beast's ardour needed no arousal, and the knots of veins in its neck, flecked with foam, were generously swollen with blood, she tickled its rump with the tip of her whip, the pommel of which was set with an amethyst engraved with her coat of arms. The animal reared, and bowed, to the great admiration of three or four young gentlemen, richly-costumed and well-mounted, who applauded the bold grace of this new Bradamante. Yolande, reining her horse back, soon ceased this pretentious cavorting and swiftly passed in front of Sigognac, at whom she cast a look full of disdain and aristocratic insolence.
— ‘Behold,’ she cried to the three young fellows, now galloping after her, ‘Baron de Sigognac has turned himself from a knight to a gipsy!’
And the group passed on, with a burst of laughter, in a cloud of dust. Sigognac made a gesture of anger and shame, and swiftly placed his hand on the hilt of his sword; but he was on foot, and it would have been madness to chase after people on horseback, and besides, he could not challenge Yolande to a duel. A languid and submissive glance from the actress soon made him forget the haughty look of the lady of the manor.
The day passed without further incident, and they arrived at the place where they would lodge and dine, at about four in the afternoon.
That evening, at the château of Sigognac, was a melancholy one; the portraits looked even gloomier and more forbidding than usual, which one might have thought scarcely possible; the staircase creaked loudly and emptily, the bare rooms seemed to have grown larger and barer still. The wind sounded strangely in the corridors, and even the spiders, seemingly restless and curious, slid down from the ceiling on their silken threads. The cracks in the walls yawned wide like jaws distended in ennui; the old, dilapidated house seemed to recognise the absence of the young master and be grieved by it.
Beside the fireplace, Pierre by the smoky light of a resin candle, shared his meagre meal with Miraut and Beelzebub, while they listened to Bayard, in the stables, dragging on his chain, and champing at the edge of his manger.
‘That evening, at the château of Sigognac, was a melancholy one’
Chapter III: The Inn of the Blue Sun
It was a sorry collection of huts, which in a place less wild none would have thought of terming even a hamlet, this place where the weary oxen halted of their own accord, shaking off the long filaments of saliva hanging from their wet muzzles, with an air of satisfaction.
The five or six dwellings were scattered beneath fairly mature trees, whose growth had been encouraged with a little topsoil, augmented by manure and detritus of all sorts. These homes, made of mud, stones, half-squared tree-trunks, and pieces of planking, and covered by large thatched roofs brown with moss descending almost to the ground, with their associated sheds in which a few mud-soiled agricultural implements were lying about, and seemingly discarded, appeared more suitable for housing domestic animals than creatures supposedly fashioned in the Lord’s image; consequently, a few black pigs shared them with their owners without showing the slightest disgust, which showed scant sensitivity on the part of these resident hogs.
Before their doorways, a few brats with round bellies and feverish complexions lingered, dressed in ragged shirts, too short at the back or the front, or even in simple vests laced with string, a degree of nudity which seemed to no more embarrass their innocence than if their place of habitation had been the earthly paradise. Through the undergrowth of their hair, which had likely never seen a comb, their phosphorescent pupils, full of curiosity shone, gleaming as the eyes of nocturnal birds do amidst the branches. Fear and longing disputed the supremacy in their countenance; they would have loved to run and hide behind a hedge, but the wagon and its burden held them transfixed, in a state of fascination.
A little behind them, at the threshold of her cottage, a lean woman, with a pale complexion and swarthy eyes, was cradling a famished infant in her arms. The child was kneading, with one small, already-tanned hand, a dried-up breast, a little whiter than the rest of the woman’s front, and still evoking the young girl concealed within this human being degraded by poverty. The woman gazed at the actors with a dull stare of stupefaction, without seeming fully aware of what she was seeing. Crouching beside this daughter, her grandmother, more bowed and wrinkled than Hecuba, the wife of Priam, King of Troy, was daydreaming, her chin on her knees, her hands crossed on her bony legs, in the pose of an ancient Egyptian idol. Her fingers, no more than a set of phalanges, and a network of prominent veins, the sinews stretched like guitar strings, made her ancient sun-scorched hands look like an anatomical preparation long ago left, forgotten, in some cupboard by a careless surgeon. Her arms were likewise nothing more than sticks over which hung parchment-like skin, creased at the joints with transverse wrinkles like marks from the blows of a hatchet. Long tufts of hair bristled on her chin; a hoary coating like moss blocked her ears; her eyebrows, like the trailing plants one finds growing at the entrance to a cave, hung before the cavernous eye-sockets in which her somnolent orbs appeared half-veiled by the flabby skin of her eyelids. As for her mouth, her gums seemed to have swallowed it, and its location was recognisable only by a star of concentric wrinkles. At the sight of this ancient scarecrow, the Pedant, who was on foot, cried:
— ‘Ah! See that dreadful, diabolical, damnable old woman! Next to her, the Fates are mere girls; she is so steeped in decay, so antiquated, so covered in mould, that no fountain of youth could ever rejuvenate her. She is the very Mother of Eternity; and when she was born, if she ever came into this world, for her nativity must surely have preceded creation, Time already sported a white beard. What a pity Master Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais, and that writer’s pseudonym) failed to behold her before seeking to portray his Sibyl of Panzoust (see ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ Book 3: XVI-XVIII) or his old woman, whom the lion had the fox wipe with the latter’s tail? (Book 2: XV) He would have known then what wrinkles, cracks, furrows, ditches, and counterscarps, the ruins of a human being can be composed of, and would have given a masterful description of them. This witch was doubtless beautiful in her springtime, for the prettiest girls make the most horrid of old women. A warning to you, young ladies,’ continued Blazius, addressing Isabella and Serafina who had drawn near to listen. ‘When I think that sixty winters following on your April will be enough to render you as filthy, abominable, and fantastical as this old woman, this mummy escaped from its sarcophagus, it truly afflicts me, and makes me cherish my own unprepossessing features, which cannot be transformed into those of a spectre out of Tragedy, but whose ugliness, on the contrary, has been perfected, as regards Comedy, by the years.’
Young women are never happy at the prospect of becoming old and ugly, which amount to the same thing, even in the most distant future. So, the two actresses turned their backs on the Pedant, each with a little disdainful shrug, as if accustomed to hearing such nonsense, and, halting beside the wagon from which the trunks were being unloaded, appeared to be extremely busy ensuring that their belongings were not mistreated; there was no reply with which they could attack the Pedant. Blazius, by declaring his own ugliness in advance, had denied them the most obvious one. He often used this same subterfuge to deliver barbs, while avoiding receiving any.
The house in front of which the oxen had halted, on account of that instinct that ensures such animals never forget a place where they have found food and shelter, was one of the most considerable in the village. It stood, with a certain self-assurance, at the edge of the road, from which the other cottages had retreated, ashamed of their dilapidation and hiding their nakedness with a few handfuls of leaves, like ugly girls unfortunately surprised when bathing. Convinced of being the finest house in the place, the inn seemed anxious to provoke the traveller’s gaze, its sign stretching an arm out above the road, as if to stop passers-by ‘on foot or on horseback.’
The sign, projecting from the facade and supported by a sort of ironwork gallows from which a man might be hanged if needs be, consisted of a rusty sheet of metal, creaking away on the metal rod from which it hung, being exposed to every gust of wind.
A passing artist had painted the daystar there, not with the traditional face and golden wig, but as a blue disc with blue outspread rays, in the manner of those ‘shadows of the sun’ with which heraldic art sometimes sprinkles the field of its coats of arms (‘ombre de soleil’: in heraldry, a sun of which only the rays are visible, and whose transparent disc lacks features such as eyes, nose, or mouth). What reason lay behind the choice of ‘The Blue Sun" as the name of this hostelry? That there are so many ‘Golden Suns’ along the high roads that one can no longer distinguish them from one another, thus a little singularity would not go amiss as regards a sign? That was not the real motive, however plausible it might seem. The dauber who had created the image had nothing but blue pigment remaining on his palette, and to replenish the palette with other hues, he would have had to make a trip to some major city. He also preached the pre-eminence of azure above all other tints, and with that celestial colour he had painted blue lions, blue horses and blue roosters on the signs of various inns, for which the Chinese would have praised him, who esteem an artist all the more the further he deviates from nature.
The Blue Sun Inn had a tiled roof, many of the tiles being brown with age, while others were still of a reddish complexion, which bore witness to recent repairs, and proved that at least the rooms would be dry.
The wall facing the road was plastered with a lime rendering that hid the cracks and damage, and gave the house a certain air of cleanliness. The timber-framed beams, forming X’s and lozenges, were accentuated in the Basque style (traditionally Basque house timbering is painted in oxblood-red, blue, or green). On the other walls, this luxury had been neglected, and their tones of rammed earth appeared quite stark. Richer or more sophisticated than the other inhabitants of the hamlet, the innkeeper had made some concessions to the delights of civilised life. The window of the best room boasted glass panes, a rare thing at that time, and in that region; the windows of the others consisted of frames covered with canvas or oiled paper, or were equipped with a shutter painted the same oxblood red as the timbers of the facade.
A shed adjoining the house provided sufficient shelter for carriages and animals. Abundant bales of hay hung between the bars of the mangers as if through the teeth of enormous combs, and long troughs, dug from old fir trunks and supported on trestles, contained the least fetid water that the neighbouring ponds could provide.
It was therefore with good reason that the innkeeper, Chirriguirri, claimed that there was no other within thirty miles around as happily constructed, as well supplied with provisions and victuals, as well heated by a good fire, equipped with as comfortable beds, or such a wealth of draperies and crockery, as the inn of The Blue Sun; and in this he was not mistaken, and deceived none, since the nearest inn was at least two days’ walk away.
In spite of himself, Baron de Sigognac felt a little ashamed to find himself entangled with a troupe of itinerant actors, and he hesitated to cross the threshold of the inn, though Blazius, the Tyrant, Captain Matamore, and Leander had granted him the honour of entering first, when Isabella, divining the Baron’s genuine reservation, advanced towards him with a resolute and sulky little face:
— ‘Come! Monsieur le Baron, you are colder with womankind than Joseph (who resisted the advances of Potiphar’s wife, see Genesis, 39) or Hippolytus (who, in Greek myth, likewise resisted Phaedra). Will you not offer me your arm, and escort me within?’
Sigognac, bowing, hastened to do so, and Isabella rested the tips of her delicate fingers on the Baron’s threadbare sleeve, so as to encourage him with their gentle pressure. Thus sustained, his courage returned, and he entered the inn with a glorious air of triumph; it mattered not, at that moment, if the whole world saw him. In this pleasant kingdom of France, he who accompanies a pretty woman is never ridiculous, but merely arouses jealousy.
Chirriguirri came to meet his guests, and offer lodging to the travellers, with a forthrightness that hinted at the proximity of Spain. A leather jacket in the style of the Malagueños (residents of Málaga) encircled at the hips by a belt with a copper buckle, highlighted the vigorous structure of his chest; but an apron turned up at one corner, and a large kitchen knife in a wooden sheath, tempered whatever fierceness his expression might have suggested, and the physiognomy of a former contrabandista was mixed with a reassuring portion of chef, just as his benign smile counterbalanced the troubling effect of a deep scar which, starting from the middle of the forehead, vanished into his short hair. This scar that Chirriguirri, bowing in welcome, beret in hand, necessarily presented to the gaze, was distinguished from the skin by a purplish colour and a depression in the underlying flesh which had proved unable to completely fill that fearsome hiatus. One would have had to have been strong indeed for one’s soul not to have escaped through such a crack; thus, Chirriguirri was a strong fellow, and his soul, no doubt, was in no hurry to discover what the other world had in store for it. Cautiously timid travellers would perhaps have found the profession of innkeeper a suspiciously pacific one for a hotelier of his appearance; but, as I said, The Blue Sun, was the only acceptable place in which to lodge in all that wasteland.
The room into which Sigognac and the troupe entered, was not quite as magnificent as Chirriguirri had implied: the floor consisted of beaten earth, and, in the centre of the room, a sort of platform formed of large stones composed the hearth. An opening cut in the ceiling, traversed by an iron bar from which hung a chain hooked to the rack, replaced the usual hood and chimney-pipe, so that the whole top of the room half-vanished in a fog of smoke whose vapours slowly rose towards the opening, if the wind, by chance, failed to blow them back. The smoke had covered the beams of the roof with a bitumen glaze similar to those seen in old paintings, which contrasted with the recently-applied lime plaster on the walls.
Around the hearth on three sides, the fourth allowing the chef free access to the cooking-pot, wooden benches set on the rough floor, which was calloused like the skin of a monstrous orange, were wedged with shards of pots or pieces of brick, so as to level them. Here and there, stood a few stools, made of a wooden board to act as a seat supported by three wooden legs one of which passed through it, so as to support a transverse piece of wood which could, at a pinch, serve as a backrest for people who cared little for their comfort, and which a sybarite would certainly have regarded as an instrument of torture. A kind of hutch, in one corner, completed the furniture, in which the crudeness of construction was matched only by the coarseness of the material employed. Lighted splinters of fir-wood, stuck on iron pegs, cast a red, swirling light over the scene, the smoke they gave off mixing, at a certain height, with the cloud from the hearth. A few saucepans, hung along the wall like shields on the sides of a trireme, if that comparison is not too noble and heroic a one for such objects, glowed dimly, reflecting dull red light, amidst the shadows. On a table, a half-deflated wineskin lay slumped in a limp, dead attitude like a decapitated torso. From the ceiling hung, in sinister manner, a long flitch of bacon on the end of a hook, which, amidst the cloud of smoke rising from the hearth, had the alarming appearance of a hanged man.
Certainly this hovel, despite the host’s pretensions, was a gloomy sight, and an isolated passer-by, though no coward, might have felt the imagination dwell on gloomy fantasies, and have feared to find instead of the customary fare one of those pies filled with human flesh to the detriment of solitary travellers; but the troupe of actors was too numerous for such terrors to grip brave histrions accustomed, moreover, by their wandering life, to the strangest of dwellings.
On the corner of one of the benches, when the actors entered, a little girl of eight or nine years old was sleeping; or at least she appeared to be of that age, so thin and puny was she. Leaning her shoulders against the back of the bench, she had allowed her head to fall forward onto her chest, her long strands of matted hair preventing her features from being distinguished. The sinews of her neck, which was slender as that of a plucked bird, were straining and seemingly finding it difficult to prevent the hairy mass from rolling to the ground. Her arms hung loosely on either side of her body, her hands lay open, and her legs, too short to reach the ground, hung in the air, one foot crossed over the other. Thin as spindles, those legs, were brick red from the effects of cold, sunlight, and the weather. Numerous scratches, some healed, others relatively fresh, revealed habitual journeys through the undergrowth and thickets. Her feet, small and delicate in shape, were clad in boots of a dusty grey, the only footwear she had probably ever worn.
As for her costume, it was very simple and consisted of two pieces: a canvas shirt so coarse that vessels employ a finer weave for their sails, and a little jacket of yellow fustian, cut in Aragonese fashion from the best-preserved piece of what had been a maternal skirt. The bird, embroidered in various colours, and commonly adorning this style of petticoat, was part of the shirt made for the little one, doubtless because the woollen threads supported the dilapidated fabric a little. The bird, superimposed thus, produced a singular effect, for though its beak bordered the waist and its legs the edge of the hem, its body, crumpled and distorted by the folds, took on a bizarre anatomical form, resembling those chimerical birds of the Medieval bestiaries, or of old Byzantine mosaics.
‘A little girl of eight or nine years old’
Isabella, Serafina, and the Soubrette took their places on this bench, though their weight, combined with the very slight weight of the little girl, was barely enough to counterbalance the mass of the Duenna, who seated herself at the other end. The men distributed themselves on the remaining benches, leaving an empty space between themselves and Baron de Sigognac, out of deference.
A few handfuls of brushwood had rekindled the fire, and the crackle of dry branches twisting in the flames cheered the travellers, somewhat stiff from the day’s fatigue, and unknowingly feeling the influence of the malaria that reigned in the neighbourhood, being surrounded by stagnant waters that the impermeable ground failed to absorb.
Chirriguirri approached them courteously, and with all the graciousness his naturally forbidding countenance allowed him.
— ‘What shall I serve your lordships? My house is stocked with everything enjoyed by gentlemen. Indeed, what a shame you were not here yesterday! I had prepared a boar’s head with pistachios, with so delicious an aroma, so candied in spices, so delicate to the taste, that sadly there was not enough left for a hollow tooth to chew!’
— ‘Truly, most painful,’ said the Pedant, licking his lips sensually at these imaginary delights, ‘a pistachio mould pleases me above all other delicacies; I would gladly have risked indigestion to taste it.’
— ‘What then would you have said to the venison pie, which the lords I hosted this morning devoured to the last piece of crust, having sacked its interior without mercy, or quarter?’
— ‘I would have deemed it excellent, Master Chirriguirri, and praised as is fitting the unparalleled merit of the chef; but what is the use of whetting our appetites, in so cruel a manner, with illusory dishes already being digested at this very hour, since you have no lack of pepper, chili, nutmeg and other spurs to drinking. Instead of those, now defunct, dishes whose succulence cannot be doubted, but which can no longer sustain us, recite to us your menu of the day, since the past tense is merely annoying as regards cuisine, while hunger loves the present indicative when at table. Be done with the past! It means but despair and fasting; the future, at least, allows, as regards the stomach, pleasant reveries. For pity’s sake, cease reciting to poor devils as starved and weary as a pack of hounds your tale of these ancient gastronomic delights.’
— ‘You are right, sir, their memory is hardly substantial,’ said Chirriguirri, giving a gesture of assent, ‘but I cannot help but regret my having imprudently stripped myself of provisions thus. Yesterday, my pantry was overflowing, and not more than two hours since I showed further imprudence in sending to the castle my last six terrines of duck-livers; admirable, monstrous livers! Real mouthfuls, fit for a king!’
— ‘Oh! What a wedding-feast like that at Cana (see the ‘Gospel of Saint John’, 2:1-12), or that of Camacho (see Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’, Chapter XX), we might have made, with all the dishes you no longer have to hand, and which more fortunate folk have devoured! For you pain us too much; confess, without rhetoric, what you do have, having spoken so eloquently of what you do not.’
— ‘That is only fair. I have garbure (a thick soup or stew, often of cabbage, meat, and beans) some ham, and a hake or two,’ replied the innkeeper, attempting a modest blush, like an honest housewife taken by surprise whose husband has brought three or four friends to dine.
— ‘Then,’ cried the starving troop in chorus, ‘bring us your hake, ham, and garbure.’
— ‘And what a garbure!’ continued the innkeeper, regaining his composure, raising his voice like a trumpet fanfare, ‘croutons simmered in the finest goose fat, curly-leafed cabbages of an ambrosial taste, such as Savoy scarcely equals, cooked with bacon whiter than the snow on the summit of Maladeta (in the Pyrenees); a soup to be served at the table of the gods!’
— ‘My mouth is watering already. But serve it quickly, for I am dying of starvation,’ said the Tyrant with the air of an ogre smelling fresh human flesh.
— ‘Zagarriga, set the table in the best room as fast as you can!’ shouted Chirriguirri, to an imaginary boy it seemed, for the latter give no sign of life, despite the urgent tone employed by his master.
— ‘As for the ham, I hope your Lordships will be satisfied; it can compete with the most exquisite ones of La Mancha or Bayonne; it is preserved in rock salt, and the meat, streaked with white and pink, is the most appetising in the world.’
— ‘We believe it as firmly as any precept in the Gospels,’ cried the exasperated Pedant; ‘but quickly unfold this ham-shaped marvel, or else scenes of cannibalism like those seen on shipwrecked galleons or caravels will take place before your eyes. We are not guilty of crimes like those of Tantalus (who, in Greek myth, was punished by food and water being ever beyond his grasp), to be tormented by elusive and imaginary sustenance.’
— ‘I cannot but agree,’ Chirriguirri continued in the most tranquil tone. ‘Hello! Hey! You in the kitchen, make an effort, strive, hurry now! These noble travellers are hungry, and can scarcely wait!’
There was no sound or movement from the kitchen, nor from the aforementioned Zagarriga either, the reason being that he, more imaginary than real, did not exist and had never existed. The only servant in the inn consisted of a tall, haggard, dishevelled girl, named Mionnette; but this perfect servant, whom Chirriguirri constantly called upon, gave the inn, according to himself, a fine air, enlivened it, peopled it, and justified the high price of lodging there. By dint of calling his other chimerical servants by their names, the innkeeper of The Blue Sun had come to believe in their existence, and was almost surprised they failed to demand their wages, a show of discretion for which he was most grateful.
Divining, from the dull clatter of dishes in the adjoining room that the table was not yet set, the innkeeper, to gain time, began to praise the hake, a somewhat sterile theme, and one which required a certain degree of eloquent effort. Fortunately, Chirriguirri was accustomed to enhancing insipid dishes with verbal spice.
— ‘Your graces doubtless think that hake is a common delicacy, and in that they are not wrong; but there are hake, and hake. This one was caught on the very banks of Newfoundland by the boldest sailor in the Bay of Biscay. It is a choice hake, white and excellent taste-wise, not tough to eat, excellent when fried in olive oil from Aix-en-Provence, preferable to salmon, tuna, or swordfish. Our Holy Father the Pope, may he grant us his indulgence, consumes nothing else during Lent; he also enjoys it on Fridays and Saturdays, and such other lean days when he is tired of teal or scoter (sea-duck). Pierre Lestorbat, who supplies me, also supplies His Holiness. The Holy Father’s hake; that, by God, is not to be despised, and your lordships are not ones to disregard it, otherwise you would not be good Catholics!’
— ‘None of us cares for Protestant beef,’ replied the Pedant, ‘and we would be flattered to gobble up this Papal hake; but, stone the crows, let this magnificent fish deign to jump from the frying pan onto the plate, or we will vanish in smoke as spectres or wraiths do at cockcrow, when the sun rises!’
— ‘It would be indecent to eat fried food before the soup; that would be putting the cart before the horse, culinary-wise,’ said Chirriguirri with an air of supreme disdain, ‘and your lordships are too well-bred to allow such an incongruity. Patience, the garbure still needs a moment or two.’
— ‘By the Devil’s horns and the Pope’s belly!’ roared the Tyrant. ‘I’d be content with a Spartan broth if it were served instantly!’
Throughout all this, Baron de Sigognac spoke not a word, and showed no impatience; he had eaten the day before! In the unending famine endured at his ‘Castle of Hunger’, he had long since become accustomed to eremitic abstinence, and his sober stomach revolted at the sight of these frequent meals. Isabella and Serafina made no complain either, for a display of voracity scarcely becomes young ladies, who are supposed to sustain themselves on dew and flower-pollen like bees. Scapin, seeking to preserve his leanness, seemed delighted, and merely tightened his belt by a notch, and the tongue of its leather buckle hung freely. Leander yawned and bared his teeth. The Duenna was dozing, while beneath her drooping chin three folds of flabby flesh bulged out like sausages.
The little girl, who had been sleeping at the other end of the bench, had woken, and now sat upright. You could see her face free of her hair, the colour of which seemed to have rubbed off on her forehead, so tawny was the latter. Beneath the tan of her face lay a waxy pallor, a profound pallor, matte in hue. Her cheeks lacked colour, and her cheekbones were prominent. The skin of her bluish lips was cracked in thin strips, though her sickly smile revealed pearl-white teeth. All life seemed to have taken refuge in her eyes.
The thinness of her face made these appear enormous, and the large brown bruises that surrounded them like haloes granted them a feverish and singular brilliance. The whites appeared almost blue in tone, so prominent were the dark brown pupils, and so thick and full the double line of the eyelashes. At that moment those curious eyes expressed both childish admiration and ferocious longing, her gaze being fixed, steadily, on the jewels Isabella and Serafina were wearing, of whose meagre worth the little savage, was doubtless unaware. The scintillation of their gilt trimmings, the deceptive orientalism of a necklace of Venetian pearls, dazzled her and gripped her as if in a state of ecstasy. Evidently, she had never, in her life, seen anything so beautiful. Her nostrils flared, a faint flush rose to her cheeks, and a sardonic smile hovered on her pale lips, erased from time to time by a feverish, rapid, dry chattering of her teeth.
Fortunately, none of the company were looking towards that wretched little pile of rags, shaking as if possessed by a nervous fit of trembling, or they would have been appalled by the fierce, sinister expression printed on the features of that livid mask.
Unable to control her curiosity, the child stretched out a brown hand, delicate and cold as that of a monkey, towards Isabella’s dress, the fabric of which her fingers stroked, with a visible expression of pleasure and voluptuous titillation. That crumpled velvet, shimmering in every fold, seemed to her the finest, richest, and softest in the world.
Though the touch had been of the slightest, Isabella turned and caught sight of the little girl’s action, at which she smiled maternally. Feeling herself under scrutiny, the child had suddenly adopted a foolish, childish expression indicating a merely idiotic stupor, with an instinctive grasp of mimicry that would have done honour to an actress consummate in the practice of her art, and, in a doleful voice, she said in her local patois: ‘It’s like the mantle of Our Lady on the altar!’
Then, lowering her eyelashes, the black fringes of which almost reached her cheekbones, she leant her shoulders against the back of the bench, clasped her hands, crossed her thumbs, and pretended to fall asleep as if overcome by fatigue.
Mionnette, the tall, haggard servant girl, entered to announce that supper was ready, and they moved to the adjoining room.
The actors did their best to honour Master Chirriguirri’s cuisine, and, without coming upon the promised delicacies, nonetheless satisfied their hunger, and especially their thirst, in lengthy embraces of the almost deflated wineskin, which looked like a bagpipe from which the air has issued.
They were about to rise from the table when they heard dogs barking, and horses’ hooves clattering near the inn. Three knocks on the door, executed with impatient authority, signalled a traveller unaccustomed to waiting. Mionnette rushed to the door, drew the latch, and a horseman, almost hurling the door in her face, entered amidst a whirlwind of dogs, who almost knocked the poor serving-maid over, and rushed about the room, leaping, frolicking, and rooting for leftovers amidst the abandoned plates, thereby in a moment performing with their tongues the work of three washers of dishes.
A few vigorous lashes of the whip, applied to their backs with no distinction between innocent and guilty, calmed their agitation as if by magic; the dogs took refuge beneath the benches, panting, with their tongues out, then laid their heads on their paws, or curled up into a ball. The horseman, his spurs clinking loudly, entered the room in which the actors were eating with the self-assurance of one who is always at home wherever he is. Chirriguirri followed him, beret in hand, with an obsequious and almost fearful air; he who was not, in truth, timid.
The cavalier, standing on the threshold of the room, lightly touched the edge of his felt hat, and gazed calmly at the circle of actors who returned his bow.
He appeared to be between thirty and thirty-five years of age; blond hair, curling in spirals, framed his sanguine and jovial head, whose pink tones were reddened by air and vigorous exercise. His gleaming eyes, a harsh blue in colour, lay flush with his head; his nose, slightly upturned at the tip, ended in a neatly-formed flat plane. Two small red moustaches, waxed at the tips, and bent to a hook-shape, twisted beneath the nose like commas, with the symmetry of a royal goatee (fashionable in Louis XIII’s reign). Between the moustaches and the goatee beard blossomed a mouth whose slightly thin upper lip amended what might have appeared overly sensual as regards the lower one, wide, red and striated with perpendicular lines. The chin curved abruptly, and made the tuft of hair of the goatee stand forth prominently. His forehead, uncovered as he threw his felt hat onto a nearby stool, displayed a white and satiny tone, preserved as it usually was from the heat of the sun by the shadow of the brim, and indicated that this gentleman, before he had left the Court for the country, must have possessed a most delicate complexion. In short, his physiognomy was agreeable; one in which the gaiety of a free companion appropriately tempered the pride of a nobleman.
The newcomer’s costume showed, by its elegance, that even in the depths of the provinces the Marquis, that being his title, had not broken off relations with the finest tailors, male or female.
His collar, of cutwork-lace, revealed his neck, and overlapped a lemon-coloured cloth coat decorated with silver braid, which was extremely short and allowed a river of fine linen to overflow between it and the breeches. The sleeves of this coat, or rather jacket, revealed the shirt to the elbows; the blue breeches, adorned with a sort of apron decorated with straw-coloured ribbon-loops, descended a little below the knee, where they plunged into soft leather boots complete with silver spurs. A blue cloak, trimmed with silver, set on the corner of the shoulder and held in place by a piece of braiding, completed his costume, which was a little too bold perhaps for the season and the location, but which I will justify in a sentence: the Marquis had been following the hunt alongside the beautiful Yolande, and had dressed in his finest clothes, wishing to maintain his old reputation for brilliance, for he had been often admired on the Cours la Reine (a promenade in Paris, created by Marie de Medici, and opened in 1618) among the refined and debonaire crowd.
— ‘Some slops for my hounds, a peck of oats for my horse, bread and ham for me, and some leftovers for my huntsman,’ cried the Marquis, jovially, seating himself at the end of the table, near the Soubrette, who, seeing a handsome lord, and one so well-dressed, had cast him an incendiary glance, and a winning smile.
Master Chirriguirri placed a pewter plate, and a goblet, before the Marquis; the Soubrette, with the grace of a latter-day Hebe (the cup-bearer to the gods in Greek mythology), poured him a large glass of wine, which he swallowed in a single gulp. The first few minutes were devoted to quelling a huntsman’s hunger, the most ravenous of all, and equal in intensity to that which the Greeks called boulimia (‘the hunger of an ox’); after which the Marquis glanced around the table, and noticed among the actors, the Baron de Sigognac, seated near Isabella, whom he knew by sight, and whom he had noted as the hunt had passed the ox-cart.
Isabella smiled at the Baron, who was speaking to her in a low voice, with that vague, languid smile, a caress of the spirit, a testimony of sympathy rather than an expression of gaiety, which could not be mistaken by those who are accustomed somewhat to female facial expressions, experience which the Marquis had no lack of. The presence of Sigognac amongst the troupe of bohemians no longer inspired amazement, and the contempt which had previously been inspired in him by the poor Baron’s dilapidated gear diminished considerably. The Baron’s enterprise in following his beauty, seated in the chariot of Thespis, amidst comic or tragic adventures, seemed to him to bear witness to a gallant imagination, and a purposeful spirit. He made a gesture of awareness towards Sigognac to show him that he had recognised him, and understood his plan; but, as a true courtier he respected his incognito, and appeared to be concerned only with the Soubrette, to whom he offered compliments with supreme gallantry, in a manner half-genuine, and half-mocking, which she received with bursts of laughter that displayed her magnificent teeth and even the back of her throat.
The Marquis, eager to progress an affair that appeared so promising, thought fit to instantly declare himself as a man extremely fond of the theatre, and an excellent judge in matters of comedy. He complained of lacking in the provinces that source of pleasure, one which tended to exercise the intellect, refine the language, increase politeness, and perfect one’s manner, and, addressing the Tyrant who appeared to be the leader of the troupe, he asked him if his previous commitments prevented him from staging a few performances of the best plays in his repertoire at the Château de Bruyères where it would be easy to set up a theatre in the great hall or in the orangery.
The Tyrant, smiling, good-naturedly, into his large bristly beard, replied that nothing could be easier, and that his troupe, one of the most excellent in the province, was in the service of his lordship; from king to maid, he added with feigned good nature.
— ‘Excellent,’ replied the Marquis, ‘and as for the terms there will be no difficulty at all; you shall fix the amount yourself; one does not haggle with Thalia (the Muse of Comedy), a muse highly regarded by Apollo, and as well-regarded at Court as in the city, or even the provinces, where folk are not as uncultivated as they pretend to believe in Paris.’
Having said this, the Marquis, after a significant knee-bump with the Soubrette, who displayed no alarm, left the table, pushed his felt hat down to his eyebrows, waved farewell to the company, and left amidst the yapping of his pack of hounds; he was riding on ahead to prepare for the actors’ reception at the château.
It was already growing late, and they needed to leave extremely early in the morning, since the Château de Bruyères was quite a distance away, and though a Barbary horse can readily cover a distance of nine or ten miles by the back roads, a heavily-loaded wagon, pulled along a large sandy road by already weary oxen, takes much longer.
The women, therefore, retired to a kind of loft, where bales of straw had been strewn on the floor for beds; while the men remained in the room, making the best of it on the benches and chairs.
Chapter IV: Scarecrows for the Birds
Let me now return to that little girl, whom I left asleep on the bench in a sleep too obviously deep not to be feigned. To me, her appearance seems rightly suspect, and the fierce desire with which her eyes fixed, wildly, on Isabella’s pearl necklace demands that her actions are closely watched.
Indeed, as soon as the door had closed behind the actors, she slowly raised her long brown eyelids, cast her inquisitive gaze into every corner of the room, and once sure that none remained, let herself slide down from the edge of the bench onto her feet, stood up straight, tossed her hair back with a movement familiar to her, and went to the door, which she opened with no more noise than a shadow. She closed it again, with great caution, taking care that the latch did not fall too abruptly, then moved away, slowly, to the corner of a hedge round which she turned.
Certain, then, that she was out of sight of the house, she took to running, leaping over ditches of stagnant water, stepping over fallen fir-trees, and bounding over the heather like a doe with a pack of hounds after her. Her long locks of hair whipped her cheeks like black snakes, and sometimes, falling from her forehead, blocked her view; then, without slowing the rapidity of her pace, she pushed them back behind her ears with the palm of her hand, and made a gesture of rebellious impatience; but her agile feet seemed to need no visual guidance, so well did they know the way.
The scene about her, as far as could be discerned by the livid light of a half-hidden moon, bearing on its brow a cloud of black velvet, was particularly desolate and gloomy. A few fir-trees, whose notches cut for the purpose of extracting resin made them look like the ghosts of murdered trees, displayed their reddish wounds on the edge of a sandy path, whose whiteness the night could not eclipse. Beyond, on each side of the road, stretched the dark-violet heather, over which floated banks of greyish vapour to which the rays of the evening star gave an air of a spectral procession, well calculated to bring terror to superstitious souls, or those unaccustomed to the phenomena of Nature in these solitudes.
The child, doubtless accustomed to these phantasmagorias of the wasteland, paid no attention to them and continued her journey. She finally arrived at a kind of hillock crowned with a score or more of fir-trees which formed a kind of little wood. With singular agility, and betraying no fatigue, she climbed the rather steep escarpment and reached the summit of the mound. Standing on this rise, her eyes, to which the shadows seemed to offer no obstruction, searched about for a while, and, seeing only the solitary immensity, she put two of her fingers in her mouth and uttered, thrice, one of those whistles which the traveller, crossing the woods at night, never hears without a secret pang, even if he thinks it to have been produced by frightened owlets, or some other harmless creature.
A pause separated each of the three cries she gave, which otherwise might well have been taken for those of an osprey, buzzard, and owl respectively, so perfect was the imitation.
Soon a heap of leaves seemed to stir, arched its back, and shook itself like a sleeping animal on being roused; and a human form slowly rose up in front of the little girl.
— ‘It’s you, Chiquita,’ said the man. ‘What news? I wasn’t expecting you, so I took a nap.’
The man whom Chiquita’s calls had awakened was a strapping fellow, between twenty-five and thirty years of age, of medium height, thin, nervous, and apparently fit for all kinds of shady activities; in turn, a poacher, a dealer in contraband goods, a smuggler of salt (to evade the ‘gabelle’, the salt-tax), a thief, and a cutthroat; all honest industries which he practiced one after the other, or even all at once, as the occasion demanded.
A ray of moonlight falling on him from amidst the clouds, like the beam of light from a shielded lantern, highlighted him clearly against the dark background of the fir-trees, and would have allowed the spectator, if there had been one there, to examine his physiognomy, and his costume which displayed a characteristic picturesqueness. His face, swarthy and coppery like that of a Caribbean savage, made his eyes, like those of a bird of prey, and his extremely white teeth, the sharply pointed canines of which resembled the fangs of a young wolf, shine by contrast. A handkerchief encircled his forehead like the bandage on a wound, and compressed the tufts of thick, curly, rebellious hair, bristling in a crest on top of his head; a blue velvet waistcoat, discoloured by long use, and decorated with buttons each formed of a small coin soldered to a metal rod, enveloped his chest; linen breeches clad his thighs, and alpargatas (espadrilles, rope-soled shoes) tied with strips of fabric that crossed about his ankles, rendered his feet as well-shod and waterproof as those of a deer. This costume was completed by a broad red woollen belt extending from the hips to the armpits, and encircling his body several times. In the centre of his stomach, a lump indicated the villain’s pantry and treasury; and, if he had turned around, one could have seen on his back, protruding either side of his belt, an immense navaja (a large knife with a folding blade) from Valencia, one of those elongated navajas shaped like a fish, whose blade is fixed by rotating a copper ring, and bears on its steel as many red striations as the murders the brave fellow who owns the weapon has committed. I know not how many scarlet grooves Agostin’s navaja had, but from the look of the rascal it was reasonable, without demonstrating any lack of charity, to suppose them numerous.
This was the character whom Chiquita now met with, in secret.
— ‘Well! Chiquita,’ said Agostin, passing his roughened hand over the child’s head in a friendly gesture, ‘what saw you at Master Chirriguirri’s inn?’
— ‘A wagon-load of travellers came,’ replied the little girl, ‘five large trunks are stored in the shed, which all seemed quite heavy, because two men were needed to lift each one.’
— ‘Hmm!’ said Agostin. ‘Sometimes travellers weight their luggage to gain respect from hoteliers; such has been known.’
‘But,’ replied Chiquita, ‘the three young ladies who are with them have gold braid on their clothes. One of them, the prettiest, has around her neck a row of large white beads of a silvery colour, which shine in the light. Oh, it’s all very beautiful! Very splendid!’
— ‘Pearls, then! Fine,’ muttered the bandit between his teeth, ‘as long as they aren’t fake! They work glass so cleverly and tastefully at Murano (the island in the Venetian lagoon famous for glass-making), and the gallants, these days, have such loose morals!’
— ‘My noble Agostin,’ Chiquita continued, in a coaxing tone of voice, ‘if you cut the beautiful lady’s throat, you’ll give me the necklace, won’t you?’
— ‘Indeed, it would suit you, and go wonderfully well with your tousled hair, your rag of a shirt, and that canary-yellow skirt!’
— ‘I’ve kept watch for you often enough, and run hard to warn you, when the fog was rising, and the dew wet my poor bare feet. Did I ever make you wait for food in your hiding places, even when the fever made me croak like a heron at the edge of a marsh, and I could hardly drag myself through the thickets and brushwood?’
— ‘You are brave and loyal, yes,’ replied the robber, ‘but we do not have this necklace in our hands as yet. How many men were there?’
— ‘Oh! many. One big and strong, with a big beard in the middle of his face; one old, two thinnish ones, one of whom who looks like a fox, and another who seems like a gentleman, though his clothes are in poor condition.’
— ‘Six,’ said Agostin, thoughtfully, counting on his fingers. ‘Alas! That number would have caused me no problem before; but of my band I alone remain. Are they armed, Chiquita?’
— ‘The gentleman has his sword, and the taller of the thin ones his rapier.’
— ‘No pistols, no arquebus?’
— ‘None that I saw.’ Chiquita answered, ‘unless they left them in the cart, but if so Chirriguirri or Mionnette would have given me a sign.’
— ‘Come then, we’ll risk it, and set an ambush,’ said Agostin, decisively. ‘Five chests, gold embroidery, a pearl necklace. I’ve exercised my talents for less.’
‘You are brave and loyal, yes,’ replied the robber…’
The brigand and the little girl entered the fir-wood, and, having reached the most secret part of it, began to clear stones and armfuls of brushwood, until they had exposed five or six planks sprinkled with earth. Agostin lifted the planks, threw them aside, and descended the dark opening thus uncovered, up to his waist. Was it the entrance to some subterranean passage, or cavern, a brigand’s customary retreat? A hiding-place where he kept stolen treasure? The ossuary in which he piled the corpses of his victims?
This last supposition would have seemed the most likely to the spectator, if there had been any other witnesses to the scene than the jackdaws perched among the fir-trees.
Agostin bent down, as though digging at the base of the hole, then stood up again, holding in his arms a human form of cadaverous rigidity, which he hurled, unceremoniously, over the edge of the hole. Chiquita showed no fear at this strange exhumation, and dragged the object, by its feet, some distance from the hole, with greater force than her frail appearance would have allowed one to suppose. Agostin, continuing his lugubrious work, hauled from this Haceldama (Akeldama, in Aramaic, or ‘The Field of Blood’ the name given the Potter’s Field, purchased with Judas Iscariot’s pieces of silver, see ‘Matthew, 27:3-8’) five more similar objects, which the little girl arranged beside the first, smiling like a young ghoul in a cemetery preparing for a feast. The open pit, the bandit drawing what appeared to be the remains of his victims from their repose, the little girl helping in this funereal task, all this beneath the black shadows of the fir-trees, composed a scene fit to inspire terror in the bravest.
The bandit took one of the mannequins, carried it to the crest of the escarpment, raised it, and made it stand upright by driving the stake to which its body was tied into the ground. Thus held, the figure mimicked the appearance of a living man amidst the shadows.
— ‘Alas! To what have I been reduced by these unfortunate times,’ cried Agostin, with a Saint Joseph’s: ‘Han!’ (‘with an effort’, ‘Han!’ being the traditional cry of woodcutters as they delivered a blow with the axe, and St. Joseph being the patron saint of carpenters and woodworkers). ‘Instead of a band of hardy rascals, handling their knives and arquebuses like elite soldiery, instead of those true companions in my solitary exploits, here are naught but tailor’s dummies clothed in rags, scarecrows for travellers to shy at! This one is Matasierpes, the valiant Spaniard, my bosom friend, a charming fellow, who with his navaja traced crosses on the faces of gabachos (strangers) as neatly as if it were a brush dipped in rouge; a fine gentleman, moreover, as haughty as if he had sprung from Jupiter’s own thigh (as the god Dionysus was, in Greek myth), offering his elbow to the ladies so they might descend from the coach, and robbing the bourgeoisie in a grandiose and royal manner! Here, like holy relics, are his cape, his golilla (neckerchief), and his sombrero with the crimson plume that I piously stole from the executioner, and with which I clothed the scarecrow who has taken the place of that young hero worthy of a better fate. Poor Matasierpes! It upset him to be hanged. Not that he cared about death, but as a nobleman, he claimed to have the right to be decapitated. Sadly, he did not keep his genealogy in his pocket, and had to expire perpendicularly.’
Returning to the pit, Agostin lifted another mannequin wearing a blue beret: ‘This one is Isquibaival, a famous man, a valiant man, full of love for his work, though sometimes over-zealous, and too ready to massacre everyone in sight. Devil take it, one mustn’t ruin the trade! Yet, he was never too greedy when it came to the spoils, forever happy with his share. He scorned gold and only loved blood; a brave nature! And what a fine attitude he displayed beneath the executioner’s blows, when he was broken on the wheel, in the square at Orthez! Neither Regulus (Marcus Atilius Regulus who returned, out of a sense of honour, to Carthage and certain death, having been sent, as a captive, to negotiate terms) nor Saint Bartholomew (who was flayed alive) showed a better countenance when undergoing torture. He was your father, Chiquita, honour his memory and say a prayer for the repose of his soul.’
The little girl made the sign of the cross, and her lips moved as if whispering holy words.
The third scarecrow had a pot on its head, and made a clanging sound in Agostin’s arms. An iron breastplate over its tattered buff coat gleamed dustily, the clasps rattling on its thigh-bones. The bandit polished the armour on his sleeve to restore its shine.
— ‘A glint of metal blazing in the shadows sometimes inspires a salutary terror. One thinks one is dealing with out-of-work mercenaries. An old hand, this one! Working the highway as if on the battlefield, with composure, method, and discipline. A pistol shot to the face robbed me of him. An irreparable loss! I would gladly avenge his death!’
The fourth figure, draped in a cloak with a saw-tooth fringe, was honoured with a funeral oration as the others had been. The bandit he represented had yielded his soul under torture, not wanting, from modesty, to agree to his magnificent deeds, and refusing, with heroic constancy, to disclose the names of his comrades to an overly inquisitive judicial process.
The fifth scarecrow, representing Florizel of Bordeaux, obtained no eulogy from Agostin, but simply regret mingled with hopeful expectation. Florizel, the lightest set of fingers in the province as regards picking pockets on town bridges, had not swung in the gallows’ chains like his less fortunate friends, to be washed by the rain, and pecked at by crows. He was travelling at the expense of the State, on the king’s galleys, over the Ocean waves and the Mediterranean Sea. He was a mere rogue among those brigands, a fox running with a pack of wolves; but he had talent, and, once having perfected his skills in the school of the galleys, might well become an important figure; one does not achieve perfection at the first attempt. Agostin was waiting impatiently for this amiable character to escape from the oar and return to him.
Short and fat, wearing a smock encircled by a wide leather belt, and a wide-brimmed hat, the sixth mannequin was placed a little in front of the others like the leader of a squadron.
— ‘You’ve earned the place of honour,’ said Agostin, addressing the scarecrow, ‘Patriarch of the Highway, Nestor of thieves, Ulysses of the tweezers and the hook, O mighty Lavidalotte, my guide and master, you who received me among the Knights of Darkness, and who, from the poor student that I was, formed a resourceful brigand. You taught me to speak scornfully, to disguise myself in twenty different ways, like the late Proteus (the Greek sea-god who was a shape-shifter) when he was in haste to evade folk; to pierce a knot in a plank, with my knife, at thirty paces; to snuff out a candle with a pistol-shot; to navigate keyholes like the north wind; to walk through dwellings unseen, as if I had a ‘hand of glory’ (the dried and preserved left hand of a hanged man) in my possession; to find the most abstruse hiding places, and without a hazel wand (which diviners employ)! How many fine precepts I have received from you, noble sir! How often you demonstrated to me, through eloquent and reasoned deduction, that our trade was made for fools! Why must it be that our stepmother Fortune caused you to starve to death in that cavern, whose exits were guarded, and which the officers of the law dared not enter? For none, however brave, care to confront the lion in his very lair; dying, he can still strike down five or six of his persecutors, with tooth or claw! Come, you whom I, though unworthy, have succeeded; command, with wisdom, this small, chimerical, inauspicious troop, these ghostly mannequins of the brave men I have lost, who, though deceased, will still fulfil their role, like the dead El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Campeador, conqueror of Valencia, who supposedly led his troops into battle after being slain, his body being strapped to his horse), as valiant men. Your spectral images, my glorious rogues, will be enough to rob those scoundrels.’
His work completed, the bandit stood on the roadside to judge the effect of his masquerade. The straw brigands looked sufficiently ferocious and terrifying, and an anxious eye is readily deceived amidst the nocturnal shadows, or the morning twilight, at one of those dubious hours when the old pollarded willows, with their stubby arms, take on the appearance of men shaking their fists, or brandishing cutlasses at the edges of ditches.
— ‘Agostin,’ said Chiquita, ‘you’ve forgotten to arm your mannequins!’
— ‘You’re right!’ the brigand replied. ‘What was I thinking of?’ The greatest geniuses may be distracted; but the error can easily be repaired.’
And he placed at the end of those lifeless arms, old arquebus barrels, rusty swords, or even simple sticks held at the ready; with this arsenal, the squad at the edge of the embankment had a sufficiently formidable appearance.
— ‘Since the stretch of road from the village to where they will dine is a long one, they’ll probably leave at three in the morning; and when they pass our place of ambush, dawn will be breaking, a favourable time, since we need our troops to be neither too well-lit nor plunged in shadow. Daylight would betray our ploy; darkness would render them invisible. In the meantime, let’s have a nap. The creaking of the ungreased wheels of their wagon, a noise which drives even wolves to terrified flight, can be heard from afar, and will wake us. We who sleep with one eye open like cats, will soon be afoot.’
With this, Agostin stretched out on a patch of heather. Chiquita lay down beside him to take advantage of the Valencian capa de muestra (a cloak made from a colourful piece of fabric) that he had thrown over himself as a blanket, and to deliver a little warmth to her poor little limbs trembling with fever. She soon felt that warmth, her teeth stopped chattering, and she fell asleep. We must admit that in her childish dreams there were no beautiful pink cherubs with white wings fluttering about, no woolly sheep adorned with ribbons bleating away, no palaces made of sugar with candied angelica towers. No, Chiquita’s dream was of Isabella’s severed head, gripping the pearl necklace between its teeth, jumping about in chaotic fashion, and trying to tear it from the child’s outstretched hands. The dream agitated Chiquita, and Agostin, half awakened by her tremors, murmured amidst his snoring:
— ‘If you don’t keep still, I’ll roll you down the slope to wriggle about with the frogs.’
Chiquita, who knew Agostin to be a man of his word, believed him, and lay there motionless. The murmur of their regular breathing was soon the only sound betraying the presence of living beings in that gloomy solitude.
The brigand and his little accomplice were still drinking deeply from sleep’s black cup, amidst the moor, when the ox-driver, rapping on the floor with his goad, arrived to warn the actors that it was time to leave The Blue Sun tavern.
They arranged themselves as best they could aboard the wagon, seated on the trunks piled at various angles, the Tyrant comparing himself to Polyphemus sprawled on a mountain ridge, which did not prevent him from snoring, shortly, like a cantor; the women huddled at the back, beneath the awning, where the folded canvases of the stage-sets provided a sort of mattress, which proved comparatively soft. Despite the horrid creaking of the wheels, which sobbed, mewed, screeched, and rattled, everyone fell into troubled sleep interspersed with incoherent and bizarre dreams, where the noises the wagon made were transformed into the ululations of wild beasts or the cries of children with slit throats.
Sigognac, his mind agitated by the novelty of this adventure, and the tumult of bohemian life, so different from the cloistered silence of his castle, walked along beside the cart. He thought of the adorable grace of Isabella, whose beauty and modesty seemed more those of a nobly-born young lady than an actress in a troupe of strolling players, and he pondered over how he might win her love, not suspecting that the thing was already done, and that the sweet creature, touched to the depths of her soul, was merely waiting for some event or other to give her heart to him, if he chose not to seek it. The timid Baron dreamed of a host of dangerous or romantic incidents, and of a devotion such as one only finds in books of chivalry, which might bring about the daunting confession of his affection, a confession the very thought of which made his throat constrict; and yet as regards that confession, the anticipation of which troubled him so much, the light in his eyes, the tremor in his voice, the half-stifled sighs, and awkward eagerness with which he approached Isabella, and the distracted replies he gave to the other actors, had already pronounced it in the clearest way. The young woman, though he had not uttered a word of love to her, was not deceived.
The dawn sky was beginning to lighten. A pale narrow band stretched above the horizon, outlining in black, quite distinctly, despite the distance, the chill expanse of heather clothing the plain, and even the tips of the grass-blades. A few puddles of water, touched by the rays of light, shone here and there like pieces of broken ice. A few slight sounds were heard, and curls of smoke rose in the still air, revealing from afar the resumption of human activity in the midst of this wasteland. Against the luminous heavens, soon tinged with pink, a strange shape loomed, which from a distance resembled a pair of compasses held by some surveyor measuring out the moor, his features not yet visible. It was in fact a shepherd, mounted on stilts, walking at a reaper’s pace over the marshy and sandy tracts.
The spectacle was familiar to Sigognac, and he paid it little attention, yet however deeply lost in reverie he may have been, he could not help being intrigued by another sight, a small bright point which glittered amidst the, as yet, intensely dark shadows of the clump of fir-trees where we left Agostin and Chiquita. It could scarcely be a cluster of fireflies; the season when amorousness illuminates those phosphorescent glow-worms was several months past. Was it but one eye of a nocturnal bird shining, there being only a single luminous point apparent? The supposition did not satisfy Sigognac; he might though have considered the glow of a lighted arquebus fuse.
However, the wagon was drawing closer, and, as it approached the fir grove, Sigognac thought he could make out, on the edge of the escarpment, a row of strange beings planted as if in ambush, whose shapes were vaguely outlined by the first rays of the rising sun; yet, given their complete immobility, he took them for old tree stumps began to smile at his own unease, and chose not to wake the actors as he had at first thought to do.
The cart’s wheels performed a few more revolutions. The bright spot on which Sigognac had kept his eyes fixed, now moved. A long fiery jet furrowed a billowing cloud of whitish smoke; a loud detonation was heard, and an arquebus ball flattened itself on the oxen’s yoke, the beasts suddenly lurching to one side, dragging the wagon with them, which a pile of sand fortunately arrested at the edge of the ditch.
At the detonation, the resultant thud of the ball, and the motion of the wagon, the whole troop awoke with a start; the young women began to utter shrill cries. The old woman however, accustomed to such adventures, remained silent, prudently slipping two or three doubloons, tightly, into the gap between her stocking and the sole of her shoe.
Standing before the front of the cart, from which the actors were trying to descend, Agostin, his Valencian cape rolled over his arm, his knife in his fist, shouted in a thunderous voice: ‘Your money or your life! All resistance is useless; at the merest sign of dissent, my men will fire on you!’
‘Your money or your life!’
While the bandit was issuing his highwayman’s ultimatum, the Baron, whose noble heart found the insolence displayed by the scoundrel intolerable, had calmly drawn his sword, and rushed upon him, his sword held high. Agostin swung his cape towards Sigognac’s legs, and watched for an opportunity to hurl his knife. Pointing the navaja towards the latter’s side, and flexing his arm with a swift movement, he drove the blade towards the Baron, who, as we know, was, happily, quite slender. A slight movement allowed him to avoid the deadly point; while the blade fell from the brigand’s hand, landing a few paces away. Agostin turned pale, since he was now unarmed, and knew that his troop of scarecrows could be of scant help to him. However, counting on the effect of surprise, he shouted: ‘Fire! You men!’ The actors, fearing to receive an arquebus ball, retreated for a moment and took refuge behind the wagon, where the women were squawking loudly like plucked jays. Sigognac himself, despite his courage, could not help lowering his head a little.
Chiquita, who had followed the whole scene with her eyes, hidden by a bush whose branches she pushed aside, on seeing the perilous situation of her friend, crawled like a snake over the dusty path, gathered the knife without anyone noticing her, and, springing up, threw the navaja to the bandit. No expression could be prouder or more savage than that which gleamed from the pallid face of the child; flashes of anger lit her dark eyes, her nostrils quivered like a kestrel’s wings, her parted lips revealed two rows of ferocious teeth, gleaming like those in the jaws of a cornered animal. The whole of her slender frame breathed indomitable hatred and rebellion.
Agostin now swung the knife for a second time, and Baron de Sigognac might well have been felled at the very start of his adventure, if an iron hand had not seized the bandit’s wrist at an opportune moment. This hand, squeezing like a vice, crushed the muscles and gripped the very bones, making the veins swell, and blood flow to the finger-ends. Agostin tried to free himself by desperately jerking his arm; he dared not turn round, since the Baron might stab him in the back, and continued to parry the latter’s blows with his left arm, yet he felt that his captive hand would tear itself from his right arm if he persisted in trying to free it. The pain became so violent that his numbed fingers opened, and released the weapon.
It was the Tyrant who, passing behind Agostin, had rendered this prompt service to Sigognac. Suddenly he gave a cry: ‘The Devil! Has a viper bitten me? I felt its fangs pierce me.’
Indeed, Chiquita was biting like a dog at the calf of his leg to force him to turn; the Tyrant, without letting go his hold of Agostin, shook the little girl off, and sent her flying ten paces down the path. Scapin, bending his long, articulated limbs like those of a grasshopper, stooped, gathered the folding-knife, closed it, and dropped it into his pocket.
During all this, the sun gradually rose above the horizon; a portion of its rose-red disc topped the line of moor, as the mannequins, beneath its revealing rays, gradually relinquished their human appearance.
— ‘Ah! cried the Pedant, ‘It seems that these gentlemen’s arquebuses have misfired due to the damp night air. In any case, they are scarcely brave, for they leave their leader in the lurch, and no more move than did the god Terminus! (Terminus was the Roman god of boundaries, whose bust in later architecture adorned ornamental boundary-stones).
— ‘And for a very good reason,’ replied Captain Matamore, clambering up the embankment. ‘They are men of straw, dressed in rags, armed with bits of iron, fellows who would be fine for keeping birds away from the cherries and grapes.’
With six blows from his foot, he sent the six grotesque puppets rolling amidst the road, and they sprawled in the dust with the mindlessly comical gestures of marionettes whose strings have been cut. Dislocated and crumpled, thus, the mannequins parodied, in a manner as laughable as it was sinister, half a dozen corpses laid low on the battlefield.
— ‘You may descend, ladies,’ the Baron said to the actresses, ‘there is nothing more to fear; the danger was wholly illusory.’
Dismayed by the ill-fated success of a ruse that had always worked well before, given the extent to which fear magnifies a threat, such is the cowardice of brigands that Agostin bowed his head with a piteous air. Near him stood Chiquita, anxious and haggard, yet furious as a bird of night surprised by the dawn. The bandit feared that these actors, who were numerous, would beat him, or worse still deliver him up to justice; but the farcical role played by the mannequins had left the whole company in a good mood, and they laughed fit to burst. Heartfelt laughter seldom associates with cruelty; it distinguishes man from wild creatures, and is, according to Homer, the prerogative of the immortal and blessed gods of Olympus who laugh to their heart’s content amid their endless days of leisure.
The Tyrant, therefore, who was kindly by nature, loosened his grip on Agostin, and still holding the bandit’s arm, said to him in a deeply tragic voice, whose tone he sometimes adopted even when speaking familiarily: ‘You clown, frightening these ladies so. For that you deserve to be hanged high, instantly; but if, as I believe, they will pardon you, for they are good souls, I shall not drag you before a magistrate. The role of a guard holds no appeal for me; nor do I wish to provide the gallows with its prey. And besides, your stratagem proved quite comical and picaresque. A fine trick for extorting gold from the cowardly bourgeoisie. As an actor skilled in ruse and subterfuge, I savour it, and your imaginativeness prompts me to show indulgence. You are no base and bestial thief, and it would be a shame, indeed, to cut short your fine career.’
— Alas!’ Agostin replied, ‘I’ve no choice but to beg mercy, and am more to be pitied than you think; none remains but myself, of a troop which was once as well-composed as yours; the executioner has taken my first, second, and third understudies; I perform the play alone on this stage which the highway presents, affecting various voices, and dressing mannequins to make folk think I’m the leader of a mighty band. Ah! It’s a melancholy fate! And then, few pass along this road, it’s so neglected, drowned in quagmires, tricky for those on foot, hard for horses and carriages; it runs from nowhere, and leads nowhere; but I’ve no means of winning a more lucrative territory. Even the least frequented road has its band of thieves. Those idlers who work, imagine that everything is rosy in a robber’s life; but there are many thorns. I long to be an honest man; but how can I present myself at the town-gate with a truculent face like mine, and in such wild and ragged attire! The dogs would bite my legs, and the officers grip my collar, if I only had one. And now my plan has failed, a well-thought-out, a carefully executed plan, which might have kept me alive for a month or more and yielded enough to buy a hat for poor Chiquita. I’ve no luck; I was born under a baleful star. Yesterday, I tightened my belt a notch, unable to dine. Your untimely bravery, stole the bread from my mouth, and since I failed to rob you, grant me alms at least.’
— ‘That’s only fair,’ replied the Tyrant, ‘we’ve prevented you pursuing your trade, so we owe you compensation. Here are two pieces of gold with which to drink our health.’
Isabella took a large roll of cloth from the wagon, and presented it to Chiquita. ‘Oh! It’s your necklace of white beads I want,’ cried the child, with a look of ardent longing. The actress undid the clasp, and placed the necklace around the neck of the distraught but delighted little thief. Chiquita silently rolled the white pearls in her tanned fingers, bending her head, and trying to view the necklace on her meagre breast, then she suddenly raised her head, shook her hair back, fixed her sparkling eyes on Isabella, and said in a deep and singular accent:
— ‘You’ve been good to me; I will never kill you!’
With a bound she leapt the ditch, and ran to a small mound where she sat down, contemplating her treasure.
As for Agostin, after saluting them, he picked up his mannequins one by one, dismantled them, and carried them back to the fir-grove, where he buried them again ready for another and better occasion. The wagon, which the drover had re-joined, for upon the detonation of the arquebus he had bravely fled, leaving his passengers to fend for themselves as they saw fit, now began moving forward, ponderously, again.
The Duenna removed the doubloons from her shoes, and secretly returned them to the depths of her purse.
— ‘You acted like the hero in a novel,’ said Isabella to Sigognac, ‘and under your protection we travel in safety; how bravely you confronted that bandit whom you must have thought supported by a well-armed band!’
— ‘The danger was very slight, it was barely a scuffle,’ the Baron, modestly, replied; ‘to defend you I’d cleave giants from skull to waist; I’d rout an entire army of Saracens; I’d fight, amidst whirlwinds of smoke and flame, ogres, endriagos (monsters) and dragons; I’d pierce enchanted forests, bound by magic spells; I’d descend like Aeneas to the Underworld, and without the golden bough (see Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, Book VI). By the light of your lovely eyes, all would become easy for me, since your presence, even the mere thought of you, infuses me with a strength that’s superhuman.’
His rhetoric was perhaps a little exaggerated, and, as Pseudo-Longinus (the unidentified author of ‘On the Sublime’ and major critic of literary style) might have said, ‘Asiatically hyperbolic’, but it was sincere. Isabella did not doubt for a moment that Sigognac would accomplish in her honour all those fabulous deeds, worthy of Amadis of Gaul, Esplandián (see the novel ‘Las Sergas de ‘Esplandián’, ‘The Adventures of Esplandián’, by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo), or Florismart of Hyrcania (‘Florismart’, and ‘The Prince of Hyrcania’ appear in the legends known as the Matter of France, derived from the chansons de geste concerning Charlemagne. Gautier here combines the two). She was right; true feeling had dictated these embellishments to the Baron, who grew more enamoured with each passing hour. Love never finds adequate terms with which to fully express itself. Serafina, who had overheard Sigognac’s speech, could not help smiling, for every young woman readily finds ridiculous all protestations of love addressed to another, which, if their object were herself, would seem the most natural in the world. She had for a moment the idea of testing the power of her charms, and of disputing the possession of Sigognac with her friend; but the inclination was of brief duration. Without feeling any particular interest, Serafina told herself that beauty was a diamond that ought to be set in gold. She was the diamond, but the gold was missing, and the Baron was so dreadfully shabby that he could provide neither the setting nor the case. The grande coquette therefore kept in reserve the telling glance, reminding herself that such love affairs were only fit for ingénues, not for leading actresses, and resumed her detached and serene expression.
Silence gripped the wagon, and sleep was beginning to close the travellers’ eyelids, when the ox-driver called out: ‘Behold, the Château de Bruyères!’
Chapter V: At the Marquis’ Château
In the clear morning light, the Château de Bruyères was seen to possess every advantage in the world. The Marquis’ domain, situated at the edge of the moor, was cultivated ground, the infertile sand advancing its last pale waves as far as the walls of the park. Its air of prosperity, forming a perfect contrast with the bleakness of its surroundings, gladdened the eyes in a most pleasant manner as soon as one set foot there; it was like a Fortunate Isle (one of the group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean, considered an earthly paradise in Greek myth) amidst an ocean of desolation.
A sunken ditch, clad with a fine stone facing, defined the boundaries of the castle without hiding it. In the moat, bordered by green banks, the clear, bright water, its purity unmarred by aquatic weeds, testified to careful maintenance. To cross this moat, one navigated a stone and brick bridge, wide enough for two carriages to pass abreast, and furnished with a railed balustrade. The bridge ended at a magnificent wrought-iron gate, a true monument of ironwork that one would have thought fashioned with Vulcan’s own hammer (Vulcan was the blacksmith to the gods in Greek myth). The gates hung on two quadrangular metal pillars, decorated with openwork, simulating an architectural order, and bearing an architrave, above which rose a mass of twisted foliage, from which in turn issued leafy stems and flowers, curved in symmetrical juxtaposition. At the centre of this ornamental mass gleamed the coat of arms of the Marquis, ‘or’ with a fess bretessed and counter-bretessed ‘gules’, with two ‘wild men’ as supporters (i.e. his arms were a shield with a gold field, and a horizontal red band, the band’s edges being ‘bretessed,’ i.e. crenellated, and ‘counter-bretessed,’ i.e. the crenellations on one side were offset from those on the other, the shield flanked by two savage figures). On each exterior side of the gates, seated on volutes en accolades (scroll-like ornaments ‘volutes’, flanking a central element, forming a bracket-like shape, an ‘accolade’) akin to the pen strokes that calligraphers trace on vellum, iron artichokes with sharp leaves bristled, intended to prevent agile marauders leaping from the bridge onto the inner platform via the corners of the gates. A few gilded flowers and ornaments, softening discreetly the severity of the metal, stripped this ironwork of its defensive aspect, leaving only the appearance of elegant richness. It was a well-nigh royal entrance, and when a valet in the marquis’ livery opened the gates, the oxen drawing the wagon hesitated to move, as if dazzled by this magnificence, and ashamed of their own rusticity. It took a prick from the goad to decide them. Those brave, over-modest beasts knew not that the plough nurtures nobility.
Indeed, through such a gateway, only carriages with gilded trains, their bodies draped in velvet, their doors adorned with Venetian mirrors or Cordovan-leather mantlets, should enter; but the theatre has its privileges, and Thespis’ chariot penetrates everywhere.
A sanded path, the width of that of the bridge, led to the château, through a garden, or parterre, planted according to the latest fashion. Rigorously trimmed boxwood outlined the borders, as if fringing a piece of damask, or rose in clipped forms of perfectly symmetrical greenery. The gardener’s shears had not permitted one sprig to exceed another, and Nature, despite her rebelliousness, was obliged to act as a humble servant to art. In the middle of each partition, stood a statue of a goddess or nymph in a mythological and gallant attitude, and in the Italianate Flemish style (blending the formal symmetry and structure of the Italian Renaissance Garden with the parterres and geometric precision of the enclosed Flemish Garden design). Sand, of varying hue, served as a ground for plant designs as regularly traced as if drawn on paper.
Halfway across the garden, a path of the same width crossed the first, not at right angles but ending at a circle whose centre was occupied by a pond decorated with a rockery, which served as a pedestal for a cherubic Triton blowing a crystal jet of water through the conch he held to his lips.
Along the sides of the beds were palisaded arbours, clipped short, which autumn was beginning to gild. Clever craftsmanship had formed the trees, which it would have been difficult now to recognise as such, into a portico, with arches which allowed glimpses, through their bays and other openings carefully arranged to please the eye, of the surrounding countryside.
Along the main path, yew trees, cut into alternating pyramids, balls, and vases, stretched into the distance, displaying their dark, evergreen foliage, as if standing in line, like a row of servants as the guests pass by.
All this magnificence amazed the poor actors in the highest degree, they who had rarely been admitted to such places. Serafina, eyeing its splendour out of the corner of her eye, promised herself to cut the feet from under the Soubrette and not allow the Marquis’ love to stray; this Alcandre (Alcandre was a pseudonym of Henri IV of France, noted for his love affairs, see François Malherbes’ poems of 1605-1610, and François de Rosset’s ‘Histoires Tragiques’, 1619) seemed to her to belong by right to a grande coquette. Since when did the maid take precedence over the lady? The Soubrette, sure of her charms, which were denied by other women but acknowledged, without question, by men, already seemed to regard herself as victorious, and not without reason; she told herself that the Marquis had singled her out specifically, and that his sudden taste for the theatre had been prompted by a glance of hers, one fit to kill, and addressed directly to the heart. Isabella, who was not preoccupied by any ambitious aim, turned her head towards Sigognac seated behind her in the wagon, in which a fit of modesty had obliged him to take refuge, and with her vague and charming smile sought to dispel the Baron’s involuntary melancholy. She felt that the contrast between the noble Château de Bruyères and the wretched Château de Sigognac could not but produce a painful impression on the soul of that poor gentleman, reduced by misfortune to involving himself in the adventures of a wagonload of wandering actors, and with her sweet womanly instinct, she dealt tenderly with that brave wounded heart, worthy in every way of better fortune.
In his head, the Tyrant was counting and recounting, like marbles in a bag, the number of pistoles he would demand in payment for the services of his troupe, adding a zero at each fresh count. Blazius, the Pedant, passing his Silenian tongue (Silenus was the elderly, drunken companion and tutor to the god Dionysus, in Greek myth) over his lips, thirsting with an unquenchable thirst, was thinking longingly of the hogsheads, barrels, and half-barrels of wine of the finest vintages that the castle cellars must contain. Leander, amending the somewhat compromised state of his wig with a small tortoiseshell comb, was wondering, with a flutter of his heart, if this fairy-tale dwelling housed a lady of the manor. A question of some importance! But the haughty and self-confident, though jovial, manner which the Marquis displayed tempered somewhat the bold advances which he had already allowed himself in his imagination.
Rebuilt under the previous reign, the Château de Bruyères presented itself, in perspective, at the end of the garden, and occupying almost the entire width of the latter. The style of its architecture was reminiscent of the Place Royale (Place des Vosges) in Paris. A large main building and two wings, set at right angles to enclose a formal courtyard (cour d’honneur) on three sides, presented a well-considered, even majestic layout, full of interest. The red brick walls, bordered by stone at their corners, highlighted the window frames, also carved from a fine white stone. Lintels of the same material emphasised the divisions of the three floors. On each window’s keystone, a sculpted woman’s face, with plump cheeks and a coquettishly adorned hairstyle, smiled with a good-humoured and welcoming air. Pot-bellied balusters supported the balconies. The clean, shining windows allowed ample curtains in rich fabrics to be partially seen, due to the glow of the rising sun which they reflected.
To break the line of the central building, the architect, a skilled pupil of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (1510-1584), had designed a kind of projecting pavilion, more ornate than the rest of the building, and presenting the entrance door, accessed by a flight of steps. Four dual columns of rustic order, with alternating round and square bases, as seen in the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, who was so frequently employed by Queen Marie de Medici, supported a cornice emblazoned, like the gate, with the coat of arms of the Marquis, and forming the platform of a large balcony with a stone balustrade, onto which opened the main window of the grand salon. Vermiculated split bosses adorned the jambs and the arch of the door, composed of two curiously carved and varnished leaves of oakwood, their fittings shining like silver or steel.
The tall roofs of delicately interlocking, semi-circular slates traced pleasantly regular lines against the clear sky, and were adorned, symmetrically, with large chimney stacks, carved on each side with trophies and other attributes. Every angle of these roofs of a purplish blue, lit happily in places by the sun, was embellished with a large bushy lead bouquet. Slight tendrils of smoke escaped from the chimneys, though it was early and the season did not yet strictly require fires to be lit, testifying to a happy, populous, and active household. In this ‘Abbey of Thélème’ (see Rabelais ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’, Book I: LII-LVII) the kitchens were already awake. The gamekeepers, mounted on sturdy horses, brought their spoils for the day’s meal; while the tenants brought provisions which were received by officers of the pantry. Footmen crossed the courtyard, on their way to deliver or execute their master’s orders.
Nothing could be more cheerful to the eye than the appearance of this château, whose walls of new brick and stone seemed to possess the tints with which the cheeks bloom in a healthy face. It conveyed the idea of expanding prosperity, an estate yet in development, but not supported merely by the momentary riches which capricious Fortune, perched on her gilded turning wheel, chooses to distribute to her favourites of a day. Beneath all this new luxury, ancient wealth was apparent.
A little behind the château, on either side of the wings, arched tall, ancient trees, their crowns tinged with saffron hues, but whose lower foliage still retained vigorous foliage. Here was the park, stretching into the distance, vast, shady, and deep, attesting, nobly, to the foresight and wealth of the Marquis’ ancestors. For riches can make buildings spring up swiftly, but cannot accelerate the growth of trees, whose branches gradually extend like those of the genealogical trees of the houses they cover and protect with their shade.
‘Here was the park, stretching into the distance, vast, shady, and deep…’
Though the virtuous Sigognac had, surely, never felt envy’s venomous teeth grip his honest heart, injecting that green venom which swiftly insinuates itself into the bloodstream, and, borne to the ends of the thinnest veins, completes the corruption of even the noblest characters in the world, he could not quite suppress a sigh at the thought that formerly the Sigognacs held precedence over the Bruyères, being of more ancient nobility and already known at the time of the First Crusade (1096-1099). This fresh, new, elegant castle, its tints of white and rose-red like those of the cheeks of a young girl, adorned with every refinement and displaying its magnificence, formed an unwittingly cruel and satirical contrast with his own poor dilapidated manor, collapsing, crumbling to ruin amidst silence and doomed to oblivion, a rats’ nest, a perch of owls, a dwelling for spiders, ready to fall about the ears of its unfortunate master who had quit its threshold, in the end, so as not to be crushed beneath that fall. All the years of tedious misery that Sigognac had spent there seemed to parade before him like spectres, their hair soiled with ash, clad in grey livery, arms dangling, in an attitude of profound despair, their mouths contracted by the rictus of a yawn. Without being envious of the man, he could not help but find the Marquis’s state to be a most happy one.
The wagon’s halt in front of the steps, roused Sigognac from his reverie, which had proved less than cheerful. He chased away the untimely, melancholic thoughts as best he could, absorbing, with a brave and manly effort a tear that was furtively rising at the corner of his eye, and jumped down, deliberately, to extend his hand to Isabella and the actresses, who were embarrassed by their skirts which billowed in the morning breeze.
The Marquis de Bruyères, who had noted the arrival of the troupe from afar, was standing on the castle steps, dressed in a tan velvet jacket and breeches, grey silk stockings, and white square-toed shoes, all gallantly trimmed with matching ribbons. He descended a few steps of the horseshoe-shaped stairs, playing the polite host who does not look too closely at the condition of his guests; moreover, the presence of the Baron de Sigognac in the troupe could, at a pinch, justify his condescension. He stopped at the third step, not deeming it fitting to descend further, and from there gave a friendly and welcoming wave of the hand to the actors.
At that moment the shrewd, and wicked, little Soubrette showed her face at the opening in the awning; a face which, highlighted against the dark background, sparkled with light, wit, and ardour. Her eyes and mouth flashed. She leant forward, half out of the wagon, her hands on the wooden crosspiece, revealing a little of her throat through the loose folds of her wimple, and as if waiting for someone to come to her aid. Sigognac, preoccupied with Isabella, paid no attention to the feigned embarrassment of the cunning hussy, who sent a bright, supplicating glance towards the Marquis.
The lord of Bruyères responded to her plea. He quickly descended the remaining steps of the staircase and approached the carriage to fulfil his duties as a cavalier servente, his arm outstretched, his foot advanced like a dancer. With a nimble and coquettish movement, like that of a young cat, the Soubrette darted to the edge of the wagon, hesitated for a moment, feigned to lose her balance, put her arm about the Marquis’ neck and descended to the ground with the lightness of a feather, barely leaving the mark of her little bird-like feet on the well-raked sand.
‘The Soubrette…put her arm about the Marquis’ neck’
— ‘Pardon me,’ she said to the Marquis, feigning a confusion she was far from feeling, ‘I thought I was about to fall and held onto the rim of your collar; when one feels oneself drowning or falling, one saves oneself however one can. A fall, moreover, is a serious matter and a bad omen for an actress.’
— ‘Allow me to consider this little accident as a favour,’ replied the lord of Bruyères, quite moved at having felt the young woman’s palpitating breast cunningly pressed against his chest.
Serafina, her head half-turned over her shoulder, her pupils close to the outer corners of her eyes, had viewed this scene, enacted almost behind her, with the jealous perspicacity of a rival who misses nothing, and which equals the penetrative powers of all those hundred eyes Argus possessed (Argus was the guardian of Io, in the Greek myth). She could not refrain from biting her lip. Zerbina (for that was the name of the Soubrette), with that bold, familiar and forceful move, had invited the Marquis’ intimacy, and was, so to speak, being granted the honours of the castle to the detriment of those actresses who played the major and leading roles; an enormity of grandiose proportions, and subversive of the whole theatrical hierarchy! ‘Damn her, that little peasant, she who needs a marquis to help her out of the cart,’ Serafina muttered to herself, in a style hardly worthy of the affected and precious tone she adopted when speaking aloud; but spite, among women, readily uses the metaphors of the market and the docks, whether they are duchesses or grande coquettes.
— ‘Jean,’ said the Marquis to a servant who, at a gesture from his master, had approached, ‘have this cart put away in the rear courtyard in front of the outbuildings, and have the stage decor and accessories it contains placed safely in some shed; tell them to take the trunks of these ladies and gentlemen to the rooms designated by the steward and grant them everything they may request. I intend them to be treated with respect and courtesy. Go.’
Having given his orders, the lord of Bruyères gravely re-ascended the steps, but not without having cast, before disappearing through the doorway, a libidinous glance towards Zerbina who was smiling at him in a delightful manner, far too welcoming in its nature as far as Donna Serafina, outraged by the impudence of the Soubrette, was concerned.
The oxcart, accompanied by the Tyrant, the Pedant, and Scapin, headed toward the rear courtyard and, with the help of the castle servants, a palace, a forest and a public square, in the form of three long rolls of aged canvas were soon extracted from the body of the wagon; they also removed a set of antique-style candlesticks intended for wedding-scenes, a gilded wooden cup, a tin dagger whose blade could be concealed in the handle, skeins of red thread intended to simulate blood from wounds, a flask of ‘poison’, an urn supposedly containing ashes, and other accessories essential to the denouements of tragic drama.
A comedy-troupe’s cart contains a whole world. Indeed, is not the theatre life in a nutshell, the true microcosm that philosophers seek in their hermetic reveries? Does it not enclose within its circle the entirety of things, and the whole array of human fates, represented so vividly by the corresponding fictitious ones? Those piles of old, worn, and dusty clothes, stained with oil and tallow, trimmed with fake reddish gold, those orders of chivalry made of metal leaves and rhinestones, those ancient swords with copper scabbards and blunt iron blades, those helms and diadems of Greek or Roman form, are they not like the cast-off clothes of humanity in which the heroes of times long past are resurrected for a moment, by candlelight? A debased, bourgeois and prosaic mind would make little of those poor riches, those wretched treasures in which the poet is content to dress his fantasies, and which prove sufficient for him, aided by subtle lighting and the prestigious language of the gods, to enchant the most indifferent spectator.
The valets of the Marquis de Bruyères, like the lackeys of every noble house as insolent as their master, touched with their fingertips, and handled with an air of contempt, these theatrical accoutrements that they helped to store beneath the shed roof, arranging them according to the orders of the Tyrant, as manager of the troupe; they felt a little degraded to serve mere actors, but the Marquis had spoken; they were obliged to obey, for he was not tender with rebels, and showed himself to be of an Asian generosity as regards stirrup-leather.
With an air as respectful as if he had been dealing with real kings and true princesses, the steward came, keys in hand, to collect the actors, and lead them to their respective rooms. In the left wing of the castle were the apartments and rooms aet aside for visitors to Bruyères. To reach them, one climbed splendid staircases, with steps of polished white stone, navigated landings and passed well-appointed seats on which to rest; one followed long corridors paved in a black and white grid pattern, lit by a window at each end, and onto which opened the doors of the rooms designated according to the colours of their hangings, which were repeated in the curtains of the exterior door so that each guest could easily recognise their rooms. There was the yellow room, the red room, the green room, the blue room, the grey room, the beige room, the tapestry room, the Bohemian-leather room, the sylvan room, the frescoed room, and whatever other names you might wish to imagine, for if I were to give a longer enumeration it would prove far too tedious, and indicate the tapestry-loom more than the writing-desk.
All these rooms were very neatly furnished, and not only with necessary items, but also pleasing ones. To Zerbina, the Soubrette, fell the tapestry room, one of the most gallant, on account of the voluptuous cherubs and mythological figures with which the tapestries were decorated; Isabella was allocated the blue room, a colour becoming to blondes; the red was reserved for Serafina, and the beige one received the Duenna, as if matching the age of the lady in its sullen severity of tone. Sigognac was installed in the room hung with Bohemian leather not far from Isabella’s door, a delicate attention of the Marquis; occupancy of this quite magnificent chamber was granted only to important guests, while the lord of the Château de Bruyères was eager to honour a man of birth especially one in company with strolling players, and to prove to him that he held him in high esteem, while respecting the mystery of his incognito. The rest of the troop, the Tyrant, the Pedant, Scapin, Captain Matamore and Leander, were distributed among the other apartments.
Sigognac, placed in possession of his lodgings, in which his little luggage had been deposited, and reflecting on the oddity of his situation, gazed, with a slightly bemused air, since he had never found himself in a like position, at the apartment he was to occupy during his stay at the castle. The walls, as the name of the room indicated, were covered with Bohemian leather embossed with fanciful flowers of extravagant foliage, delineating on a background of varnish their gilded corollas, scrolls, and leaves, illuminated with colours whose metallic reflections shone like real gold. The material was as rich as it was decorous, reaching to the cornice, above which the ceiling of dark oak was neatly divided into panels, lozenges, and coffers.
The window-curtains were of yellow and red brocatelle, echoing the walls, and the dominant colour of the flowers. This same brocatelle formed the upholstery of the bed, whose headboard stood against the wall, and whose legs extended into the room so as to form an alley on each side. The door panels and the furniture were of a similar fabric, and matching shades.
Square-backed chairs with spirally-turned legs, studded with gold nails and adorned with fringes, and armchairs with well-padded arms were placed along the walls, awaiting guests, with others well-placed near the fireplace for intimate talk. This fireplace, in grey and red-speckled Sarrancolin marble (quarried near Sarrancolin, Gascony, in the foothills of the Pyrenees) was tall, wide, and deep. A fire, delightful on that cool morning, blazed away appropriately, illuminating with its joyous reflections a plaque bearing the arms of the Marquis de Bruyères. Over the door, a small clock, depicting a pavilion, whose dome was its gong, indicated the time on a nielloed silver dial, with an openwork centre revealing the inner complexity of its movement.
A table, its legs twisted Solomonic columns, and covered with a Turkish rug, occupied the centre of the room. Before the window, a dresser tilted its bevelled Venetian mirror above a guipure tablecloth bearing an entire arsenal designed for gallant and captivating adornment.
Looking at himself in this bright mirror, curiously framed in tortoiseshell and metal, our poor Baron could not help but feel himself most ill-looking, and lamentably dishevelled. The elegance of the room, the novelty and freshness of the objects with which he was surrounded made the ridiculousness and dilapidation of his costume even more evident, a costume already unfashionable before the assassination of the late king (Henri IV, in 1610). A faint blush, despite his being alone, passed over the Baron’s thin cheeks. Until then he had found his misery only deplorable, now it seemed to him grotesque, and for the first time he felt ashamed; a feeling that was hardly philosophical, though excusable in a young man.
Wishing to appear somewhat better dressed, Sigognac undid the bundle in which Pierre had enclosed the meagre rags his master owned. He unfolded the various pieces of clothing it contained, but found nothing to his liking. Either the doublet was too long, or the breeches too short. Patches, worn to the bare cord, marked the protrusions where elbows and knees offered greater exposure to friction. Between the disjointed pieces the seams yawned wide and showed their thready teeth. Where places had been darned, and more than once, the previous holes were covered with a complex wiry net like those on prison-cell view-holes or in the centre of Spanish doors. Faded by sunlight, air, and rain, the colours of these rags had become so indeterminate that a painter would have had difficulty in designating them by their proper name. His linen was hardly any better. Numerous washings had reduced it to a most tenuous state. Here were shadows of shirts rather than real ones. They looked as if they had been trimmed from the manor’s cobwebs. To add insult to injury, rats, finding nothing in the pantry, had gnawed some of the those in better condition, spending as many days on snipping at them with their incisors as on any lace collar, an untimely effort that the poor Baron’s wardrobe could well have done without.
This melancholy inspection absorbed Sigognac so much that he failed to hear a discreet knock at the door, the latter opening slightly, giving way first to the head, then the ample body of Monsieur Blazius, who entered the room with many an exaggerated, and servilely comic, or comically servile bow, denoting a half-true, half-feigned respect.
When the Pedant arrived, Sigognac was holding a shirt by both sleeves, and presenting it, full of holes as it was, and as unsolid as the rose window of a cathedral, to the light, while shaking his head with a sad air of discouragement.
— ‘Damn me!’ cried the Pedant, whose voice made the Baron shudder in surprise, ‘That shirt has a valiant and triumphant air about it. It looks as if, while adorning the very breast of the god Mars, it has played a bold part in an assault on some fortress or other, so gloriously has it been perforated, pierced, nay riddled with musket-balls, bolts, darts, arrows, and other missiles. No need to be ashamed of it, Baron; those holes are mouths through which honour proclaims itself, while many a brand new piece of Frisian or Dutch canvas, pleated in the latest Court fashion, hides the infamies of some upstart, some extortionist, some simoniac scoundrel; why, several notable heroes, whose actions are recorded in immense detail in the history books, were none too well supplied with linen; witness Ulysses, that grave, prudent, and subtle character, who presented himself, veiled only in a handful of leaves, to the beautiful princess Nausicaa, as Homer tells us in his ‘Odyssey’!’
— ‘Sadly, my dear Blazius’, replied Sigognac, ‘I resemble that brave Greek, the lord of Ithaca, only in my lack of a decent shirt. My previous exploits scarcely compensate for my present poverty. Opportunity has been lacking to display my valour, and I doubt if I will ever be sung by the poets in dactylic hexameters. I confess that it angers me, I know not why, since one should not be ashamed of honest poverty, in appearing thus attired before this company. The Marquis de Bruyères recognised me well enough, though he chose not to show it, where he might have betrayed my secret.’
— ‘It is, indeed, most unfortunate,’ replied the Pedant, ‘but there’s a remedy for everything except death, as the proverb says. We poor actors, mere shades of human life, phantoms of folk of every kind, in default of the reality at least maintain the appearance of it, resembling that same as its reflection resembles an object. When we choose, thanks to our wardrobe which reflects our kingdom, patrimony and lordship, we take on the appearance of princes, noble barons, gentlemen of proud bearing and gallant mien. For a few hours, we equal in the gallantry of our accoutrements those who most pride themselves on such: the fops and dandies imitate our borrowed elegance, whose artifice they render real, substituting quality fabrics for serge, gold for tinsel, diamond for marcasite; the Theatre is a very school of manners, an academy of fashion. As the troupe’s costumier, I know how to turn a coward into a veritable Alexander, some poor devil recruited by chance into a rich lord, a servant-girl into a great lady, and if you are happy for me to do so, I will employ my efforts on your behalf. Since you have been willing to follow our vagabond path, then utilise our resources at least. Leave off this livery of melancholy and wretchedness that hides your natural advantages and inspires in you an unjustified mistrust of yourself. I have, in reserve, in a trunk, a perfectly clean, black velvet suit with fiery red ribbons, without a hint of theatrical dress, which could be worn by a courtier, since, these days, it is a common fancy among authors and poets to stage the events of the day, though the characters bear false names, which requires honest garb, not strolling players extravagantly disguised in antique or Romantic costume. I have the shirt, the silk-stockings, the shoes with bows, the coat, all the accessories of dress which seem cut expressly for you, as if in anticipation of the need. Nothing is lacking, not even a sword.’
— ‘Ah! That I have no need of,’ said Sigognac, with a haughty gesture in which all the pride of the nobleman whom no misfortune can overthrow, one more appeared. ‘I have my father’s own.’
— ‘Keep it safe,’ replied Blazius, ‘a sword is a faithful friend, a guardian of its master’s life and honour. It will not abandon him in disaster, peril, evil encounters, as do flatterers, the vile parasitic progeny of wealth. Our theatrical swords have neither edge nor point, for they only inflict feigned wounds of which one is instantly healed at the end of the play, and without ointment, lint, or theriac (an ancient medicinal compound, employed as an antidote and panacea). Yours will know how to defend you in case of need, as it already did when that bandit with his scarecrows attempted his ridiculous ambush on the highway. But allow me to bring you the rags I speak of, from the depths of the trunk that hides them; I long for the chrysalis to become a butterfly.’
Having spoken thus, with the grotesque hyperbole which was customary with him when speaking, and which derived from his theatrical role, the Pedant left the room, but soon returned carrying in his arms a largish package wrapped in cloth, which he respectfully placed on the table.
— ‘If you will accept an old comedic pedant as your valet,’ said Blazius, rubbing his hands with satisfaction, ‘I’ll render you an Andonis, and curl your hair in the most excellent manner possible. Every lady will instantly dote upon you; for, without insulting your kitchen at Sigognac, you have fasted enough in your Tower of Hunger (a reference to Ugolino’s prison in Dante’s ‘Inferno’, Cantos 32-33) to possess the face of a man truly dying of love. Women only believe in passions that cause leanness; the pot-bellied fail to attract them, even with those golden chains attached to their mouths, symbols of eloquence, by means of which the nobility, bourgeoisie, and peasantry, hung on the lips of Ogmios, the Celtic Hercules. It is for this reason and no other that I have achieved but mediocre success with the fair sex, and have taken, early in life, to the blessed bottle, which does not demand so great a sacrifice, and welcomes fat men favourably, as casks of large capacity.’
Such is the manner in which the honest Blazius tried to raise Baron de Sigognac’s spirits, while dressing him in fresh clothes, for the volubility of his tongue detracted not at all from the activity of his hands; and even at the risk of being annoyingly talkative, he preferred to dumbfound the young gentleman with a flood of words rather than leave him bowed down by painful reflection.
The Baron’ toilette was soon completed, for the theatre, demanding rapid changes of costume, requires great dexterity on the part of actors as regards such metamorphoses. Blazius, pleased with his efforts, led Baron de Sigognac by the tip of his little finger, as one leads a young bride to the altar, before the Venetian mirror over the dressing-table, saying: ‘Now, deign to cast a glance at your lordship.’
Sigognac viewed in the mirror an image that he at first took for that of someone else, so different was it from his own. He turned his head, involuntarily, and looked over his shoulder to see if there was someone behind him. The image imitated his movement. There was no longer any doubt, it was indeed himself: no longer the gaunt, sad, pitiful, well-nigh ridiculous Sigognac, in all his poverty, but a young, elegant, superb Sigognac, whose old clothes abandoned on the floor resembled those dull grey sheathes relinquished by caterpillars when, as butterflies with wings of gold, cinnabar, and lapis lazuli, they fly towards the sun. An unknown being, previously imprisoned in his sorry envelope, had emerged, suddenly, to shine amidst the clear light falling from the window, like a previously unseen statue whose veil has been removed at some public inauguration. Sigognac viewed himself as he had sometimes done in dream, as an actor in, and spectator of, an imaginary event, taking place at his castle restored and re-decorated by skilful yet invisible architects, in which he received an adored infanta, who had arrived there on her white pony. A smile of glory and triumph fluttered for a few seconds like a purple glow on his pale lips, as the tint of youthfulness, buried so long beneath a weight of misfortune, reappeared on the surface of his handsome features.
Blazius, standing near the mirror, contemplated his work, stepping back to better enjoy the sight, like a painter who has added a last touch to a painting, with which he is finally satisfied.
‘Blazius, The Pedant’
— ‘If, as I hope, you take yourself to Court and thereby recover your estates, grant me, on retirement from the stage the government of your wardrobe,’ he said, imitating the bow of a petitioner before the transformed Baron.
— ‘I shall note your request,’ replied Sigognac with a melancholy smile; ‘you are, my dear Blazius, the first human being who has ever asked aught of me.’
— ‘After dinner, which shall be served to us privately,’ said the Pedant, ‘we must pay the Marquis de Bruyères a visit, show him the list of plays in our repertoire, and discover from him in which part of the castle we must erect our stage. You shall be considered the poet of the troupe, for there is no shortage of fine minds in the provinces, who sometimes pursue Thalia’s footsteps, in the hope of touching the heart of some actress or other; which is a very gallant thing and much to be praised. Isabella provides a pretty pretext, especially since she possesses wit herself, as well as beauty, and virtue. Ingénues are often more naturally gifted in reality, than a frivolous and vain public supposes.’
Having said this, the Pedant withdrew, to attend to his own appearance, though he was not especially vain.
The handsome Leander, thinking of the imaginary chatelaine still, adorned himself as best he could, in hopes of advancing the impossible affair of which he was forever in pursuit, and which, according to Scapin, had never brought him anything but disappointment and the odd thrashing. As for the actresses, to whom the Marquis de Bruyères had gallantly sent a few pieces of silk fabric to enhance, if needs be, their theatrical costumes, I believe they had recourse to all those resources that art employs in order to adorn Nature, and to put themselves on a full war footing to the extent that the meagre wardrobe maintained by travelling actresses allowed them. These matters taken care of, they went to join the men in the room in which dinner was to be served.
Impatient by nature, the Marquis visited the actors at the table before the end of their meal; he would not allow them to rise to him, and when they had been given the means to wash their hands, he asked the Tyrant about their repertoire.
— ‘We perform all those of the late Alexandre Hardy (who died in 1632)’ replied the Tyrant in his cavernous voice, ‘as well as the Pyramus of Théophile de Viau (1621); the Sylvie (1626) of Jean Mairet, his Chryséide and Arimand (1625) and his Sylvanire (1631); Les Follies de Cardenio (1628) by Michel Pichou, his Infidèle Confidente (1629), and his Filis de Scire (1630) ; the Lygdamon and Lydias (1631) of Georges de Scudéry, and his Trompeur Puni (1633); La Veuve by Pierre Corneille (1632); La Bague de l’Oubli by Jean Rotrou (1635), and all the best that the finest minds of our day have produced.
— ‘For some years I have lived retired from the court, and so am not acquainted with the latest developments,’ said the Marquis modestly; ‘it would be difficult for me to pass judgment on so many excellent pieces, most of which are unknown to me; I think the most expedient thing would be to trust to your judgement, which, supported as it is by theory and practice, cannot fail to prove wise.’
— ‘We have often performed one particular play,’ replied the Tyrant, ‘which may have made little impression, but which, for theatrical effects, comic repartee, satire, and buffoonery, has always had the power to make most honest people laugh.’
— ‘Consider no other,’ said the Marquis de Bruyères, ‘and what is the name of this delightful masterpiece?’
— ‘Les Rodomontades du Capitaine Matamore’ (‘Captain Matamore’s Rodomontades’, or ‘boasts’).
— ‘A fine title, indeed! Tell me, does the Soubrette have a leading role?’ said the Marquis, glancing at Zerbina.
— ‘The most coquettish and naughtiest in the world, and Zerbina plays it to the utmost of her ability. It is her triumph. She has always made a noise in the part, and that without a claque of paid supporters planted in the audience.’
At this directorial compliment, Zerbina felt it her duty to blush a little, though it was hard for her to raise a spot of vermillion on those tanned cheeks. She was completely devoid of that inner rouge, modesty. Amidst the clutter on her dressing table, there was no such pot of make-up. She lowered her eyes, which drew attention to the length of her black eyelashes, and she raised her hand as if to halt in passing those all-too flattering words, and the movement displayed a well-formed hand, though with a coquettishly crooked little-finger, and pink nails gleaming like agates, having been polished with powdered coral, and the exercise of a chamois leather.
Zerbina was charming in her way. Feigned modesty often adds flavour to genuine depravity; it pleases libertines, though they are seldom fooled by it, due to the piquancy provided by such a contrast. The Marquis regarded the Soubrette with an ardent but knowing eye, and showed the other women only the vague politeness of a well-bred man who has made his choice.’
— ‘He has not inquired as to the role of grande coquette, thought Serafina, fuming with vexation; ‘that’s not fitting, and this lord, so rich in possessions, seems to me dreadfully lacking in wit, politeness, and good taste. He definitely has base inclinations. His time in the provinces has spoiled him, and his custom of courting village-girls and shepherdesses has robbed him of all delicacy.’
These reflections scarcely made the Serafina more amiable. Her regular, but somewhat hard features, which needed to be softened by the studied sweetness of a smile, and a flutter of the eyelids, in order to please, took on, when drawn, a sullen dryness. Doubtless she was more beautiful than Zerbina, but her beauty had something haughty, aggressive, and malicious about it. Love might have risked an assault; Caprice retreated in fear.
Thus, the Marquis withdrew without attempting the slightest of gallantries with Serafina, or Isabella, whom he regarded as being attached to the Baron de Sigognac. Before crossing the threshold, he said to the Tyrant: ‘I have given orders for the orangery, which is the largest space in the castle, to be cleared, so as to leave room for the theatre; they have brought planks, trestles, tapestries, benches, and everything needed for an impromptu performance. Keep an eye on the workmen, who are unfamiliar with such work; deal with them as the commander of a galley does his crew. They will obey you as they would myself.’
The Tyrant, Blazius, and Scapin were led, by a valet, to the orangery. It was they who usually took care of the material arrangements. The hall was perfectly suited to a theatrical performance because of its oblong shape, which allowed the stage to be placed at one end, and armchairs, chairs, stools and benches to be arranged in rows in the vacant space, according to the rank of the spectators, and the honour that was to be bestowed upon them. The walls were painted with images of green trellises against a background of sky, simulating a rustic architecture with pillars, arches, niches, domes, and alcoves, all in correct perspective, and lightly garlanded with foliage and flowers to offset the monotony of the trellises’ diamond-patterns and straight edges. The semi-domed ceiling presented a view of the heavens, streaked with a few white clouds and dotted with brightly-coloured birds, forming a decorative space that could not have been more appropriate for the new purpose to which it would be put.
A slightly sloping platform was erected on trestles at one end of the hall. Wooden racks intended to support the wings were erected on each side of this stage. Large pieces of tapestry, raised on taut ropes, were to serve as the proscenium curtains, which when opened, would hang to the right and left like the folds of a harlequin’s cloak. A strip of toothed fabric, like the trim of a bed canopy, composed the frieze and completed the stage’s frame.
While the theatre is under construction, let us turn our attention to the inhabitants of the château, about whom it would be right to supply some details. I forgot to mention that the Marquis de Bruyères was married; he remembered it so seldom himself that the omission may perhaps be forgiven. Amor, as one can well imagine, had not presided over their union. An equal number of noble estates, parcels of land that suited each other admirably, had decided it. After a very brief honeymoon, feeling little sympathy for one another, the Marquis and Marquise, being decent people, had not pursued impossible happiness in a relentlessly bourgeois manner. By tacit agreement, they had renounced the idea, and lived together, in amicable separation, in the most courteous way in the world and with all the freedom that decorum allows. Do not think from this comment, that the Marquise de Bruyères was an unattractive or unpleasant woman. What repels a husband can still delight a lover. Amor wears a blindfold, if Hymen does not. Besides, I am going to introduce you to her, so you may judge for yourself.
The Marquise lived in a separate apartment, which the Marquis never entered without being announced. I will commit the incongruous error that authors of all times have ever committed, and without uttering a word to the little page who would, in fact, have instantly run to warn the chambermaid, I will enter the bedroom, assured of disturbing no one, since he who writes a novel naturally wears on his finger the ring of Gyges, which renders him invisible.
Here was a vast room, high-ceilinged, and sumptuously decorated. Flemish tapestries, representing the doings of Apollo, covered the walls in warm, rich, soft hues. Crimson curtains of Indian damask hung in ample folds before the windows, and, where they were struck by a happy ray of light, took on a ruby-red translucency. The bed-cover was of the same fabric, the lengths of which, accentuated by braid, formed regular bands, shimmering with reflected light. A tasselled frieze, repeated on the dais, surrounded the canopy, adorned at the four corners with large plumes of crimson feathers. The body of the fireplace, surrounded by a tall rail, projected far into the room, and was visible to the ceiling. A large Venetian mirror, enriched by a crystalline frame, whose glittering hollows and angles were alive with multi-coloured gems, leant from the moulding into the room to meet one on entry. Resting on the twin firedogs, each formed of a series of vertical bulges and surmounted by an enormous ball of polished metal, a trio of logs, each of which could have served as the yule log at Christmas, burned with a crackling sound. The heat they spread was necessary, at that time of year, and in a room of that size.
Two cabinets of curious design, with lapis lazuli columns, pietra dura inlays, and secret drawers, into which the Marquis would not have dreamed of prying, even had he known how to open them, were symmetrically placed on each side of a dressing table in front of which Madame de Bruyères was seated, on one of those armchairs peculiar to the reign of Louis XIII, the back of which presents, at shoulder height to its occupant, a sort of padded board with an ornate border.
Behind the Marquise were two maids who were assisting her, one offering a pincushion and the other a box of ‘mouches’ (small discs of black taffeta or velvet, employed as beauty spots).
The Marquise, although she admitted to being only twenty-eight years old, might have already passed the age of thirty, a threshold women have such an innate reluctance to traverse, being far more dangerous to them than the Cape of Storms (the Cape of Good Hope) which terrifies sailors and pilots. By how many years? No one could say, not even the Marquise, so ingeniously had she introduced a certain vagueness to the relevant chronology. The most expert historians in the art of verifying dates would have drawn a blank.
Madame de Bruyères was a brunette, whose plumpness in late youth had lightened her complexion; the olive tones of her formerly thinner features, combated by the use of pearl white and talcum powder, had given way to a matte whiteness, a little sickly by day, but dazzling in candlelight. The oval of her face had become fuller due to the roundness of her cheeks, without however losing its nobility. The line from neck to chin was still quite delicate. The nose, perhaps a little too curved for feminine beauty, was not lacking in pride, and separated two level eyes, the colour of Spanish tobacco, to which her arched eyebrows quite far from the eyelids granted an air of astonishment.
Her abundant, black hair had just received its final touches from the hairdresser, whose task must have been quite complicated, judging by the quantity of curl papers that littered the carpet around the dressing table. A line of thin curls, twisted into heart-catchers (kiss curls), framed the forehead, and looped at the base of a mass of hair pulled back into a chignon, while two enormous, airy tufts, puffed up and crimped with brisk, rapid movements of the comb, gracefully adorned the cheeks. A cockade of ribbons trimmed with jet embellished the weighty loop tied at the nape of the neck. Her hair was one of the Marquise’s greatest assets, being ample enough to be styled in every way, without resorting to the artifice of wigs and hairpieces, and for that reason she was happy to receive ladies and gentlemen at the hour when her women were tending her.
The nape of her neck conducted the eye via full and firm contours to her extremely white and plump shoulders, left uncovered by the cut of the bodice, in which two attractive dimples were to be found. Her breasts, brought together by her tight whalebone corset, formed those half-globes that poetic flatterers, creators of madrigals and sonnets, persist in naming ‘hostile brothers’, although they are often reconciled with one another, less fierce in this than the brothers of the ‘Thebaid’ (see Statius’ epic poem, the brothers were Eteocles and Polynices).
A black silk cord, traversing a ruby heart, and supporting a small cross of precious stones, encircled the neck of the marquise, as if to combat the pagan sensuality awakened by the sight of her charms on display, and to defend from profane desire the opening of her bodice, poorly defended by a frail rampart of guipure lace.
Over a white satin skirt, Madame de Bruyères wore a dress of dark red silk, trimmed with black ribbons and jet beading, with cuffs or facings turned up like the gauntlets of men-at-arms.
Jeanne, one of the Marquise’s ladies, presented her with the box of ‘mouches’, the last essential mark of fashion at that time, for any woman who prided herself on her elegance. Madame de Bruyères placed one at the corner of her mouth, and thought for a long time about where to attach the other, the one called the ‘assassin’, as the proudest and most courageous are attacked by it in a manner that they cannot resist. The lady’s-maids, seeming to understand how serious the matter was, remained motionless, holding their breath so as not to disturb the coquettish musings of their mistress. Finally, the hesitant finger settled on the place, and a dot of taffeta like a black star in a whiteness of sky adorned the left breast, like a birthmark. Which pair of ‘mouches’ as much as declared, in bold hieroglyphics, that one could only reach the lips by travelling via the heart.
Satisfied with her appearance, after a last glance at the Venetian mirror over her dressing table, the Marquise rose, and took a few steps across the room; but, instantly changing her mind, since she had realised something was lacking, she returned, and took from a box a large watch, a Nuremberg egg, as such were then called, curiously enamelled in various colours, studded with diamonds, and suspended from a chain ending in a hook which she fastened to her belt, beside a little hand mirror framed in silver gilt.
— ‘Madame looks beautiful today,’ said Jeanne in a coaxing voice; ‘her hair shows her to advantage, and her dress suits her perfectly.’
— ‘You think so?’ replied the Marquise, her speech trailing away in a distracted show of nonchalance. ‘On the contrary, I feel frighteningly ugly. I have dark circles under my eyes, and this colour makes me look fat. What if I were to wear black? What do you think, Jeanne? Black makes me look thinner.’
— ‘If madame wishes, I will set out her merle, or her plum-coloured, taffeta dress; it will take a matter of moments, but I fear madame will spoil a most successful toilette.’
— ‘It will be your fault, Jeanne, if I put Cupid to flight, and fail to attract all hearts tonight. Has the Marquis invited many to this charade?’
— ‘Several messengers have been sent. The company is sure to be numerous: people will come from all the surrounding châteaux. Opportunities for entertainment are so rare in the countryside!’
— ‘All too true,’ said the Marquise with a sigh; ‘people here live dreadfully frugal live as regards pleasure. And these actors, have you seen them, Jeanne? Are there any among them who are young, of good appearance and noble presence?’
— ‘I cannot say, Madame; these people have masks rather than faces; white lead, rouge, wigs make them appear brilliant in the candlelight, and quite different to normal. However, it seemed to me that there was one who is not too unhandsome, and adopts the air of a cavalier; he has white teeth, and rather well-shaped legs.’
— ‘He must play the Lover, Jeanne,’ said the Marquise; ‘the prettiest boy in the troupe is always chosen for the role, since it would be unfitting to utter sweet nothings equipped with a nose like a trumpet, or make knock-kneed declarations of affection.’
— ‘That would be most ugly, indeed,’ laughed the maid. ‘Husbands are as they are, but lovers must be without faults.’
— ‘Thus, I love these gallants of comedy, ever flowery in their speeches, experts in expressing beautiful sentiments, who swoon at the feet of a merciless woman, swear to high heaven, curse their ill-fortune, draw their swords to pierce their own breasts, breath fire and flame in a volcano of passion, and say such things as drive the coldest and most virtuous to ecstasy; their speeches touch my heart, most pleasantly, and they sometime seem as if addressing themselves to me. Often the lady’s severity renders even me impatient, and I scold her inwardly for forcing so perfect a lover as hers to languish and wither.’
— ‘It is because Madame has a kind soul,’ replied Jeanne, ‘and hates to see people suffer. As for me, I’m in a more ferocious mood, and it would amuse me to see the man die of love in earnest. Fine phrases don’t woo me.’
— ‘You should be more positive, Jeanne; your mind is a little too immersed in material things. You don’t read plays or novels as I do. Did you not tell me just now that the gallant in this troupe was a handsome fellow?’
— ‘The Marquise may judge for herself,’ said the maid, who was gazing out of the window. ‘There he is, crossing the courtyard, no doubt on his way to the orangery, where the stage is being erected.’
The Marquise approached the casement, and saw Leander walking slowly, with a thoughtful air, like a man absorbed by a deep passion. Just in case, he had affected that melancholy attitude by which women, divining some heartache needing consolation, seem to be attracted. Arriving beneath the balcony, he raised his head with a particular movement, which afforded his eyes a particular brightness, and fixed on the window a long, sad look, full of seeming despair at an impossible love, though also expressing the most lively and respectful admiration. Seeing the Marquise, whose forehead rested against the windowpane, he removed his hat so as to sweep the earth with its plume, and made one of those profound bows such as are made to queens and goddesses, and which mark the distance between the Empyrean and mere nothingness. Then he covered his head again, with a graceful gesture, and re-assumed the superb air of cavalier arrogance, which he had abjured, momentarily, at the feet of beauty. It was neat, precise, and well performed. A true lord, accustomed to the world, and familiar with Court life, could not have grasped such nuances any more clearly.
Flattered by this greeting, both discreet and courteous, in which he had rendered to her rank what was owed, and so effectively, the Marquise de Bruyères could not help but reply with a slight inclination of the head accompanied by an imperceptible smile.
These favourable signs did not escape Leander, and his natural conceit did not fail to exaggerate their significance. He did not doubt for a single instant that the Marquise was now in love with him, and his extravagant imagination began to build a whole chimerical romance around the fact. He would finally fulfil his lifelong dream, a romantic affair with a truly great lady, in a well-nigh princely castle, he, a poor provincial actor, full of talent of course, but one who had not yet played before the Court. Filled with this nonsense, he felt roused; his heart swelled, his chest expanded, and, the rehearsal over, he returned to his room to write a note in the most hyperbolic style, which he fully intended to send to the Marquise.
As all the roles in the play were known beforehand, as soon as the Marquis’ guests arrived, the performance of Captain Matamore’s Rodomontades could take place.
The orangery, transformed into a theatre, looked most charming. Clusters of candles, fixed to the walls in arms or sconces, cast a soft light, favourable to the women’s appearance, without losing the effect of the scene. Behind the spectators, on tiered planks, were placed the orange trees, whose foliage and fruit, heated by the warm atmosphere of the room, gave off a most sweet odour, mingling with the perfumes of musk, benzoin, amber and iris.
In the front row, next to the stage, in massive armchairs, sat Yolande de Foix, Duchess of Montalban; the Baroness d’Hagetmeau; the Marquise de Bruyères, and other ladies of quality, in dresses of a richness and elegance intended to be unsurpassed. Their attire was all velvet, satin, silver and gold cloth, guipure lace, twisted silver wire, diamond studs, turrets of pearls, gemmed earrings, and clusters of precious stones that sparkled in the candlelight shedding stray gleams; without mentioning the far more vivid sparks emitted by the diamonds of the ladies’ eyes. At Court itself, one could not have witnessed a more brilliant gathering.
If Yolande de Foix had not been there, several mortal goddesses would have caused Lord Paris to hesitate when charged with awarding the golden apple, but her presence rendered the struggle vain. Yet it was not the indulgent Venus she resembled, but rather savage Diana. The young chatelaine displayed a cruel beauty, an implacable grace, and a perfection sufficient to make men despair. Her face, fine and elongated, did not seem modelled from flesh, but carved from agate or onyx, so pure, elevated, and noble were its features. Her slender neck, flexible like that of a swan, flowed, in a virginal line, to shoulders still a little undeveloped and a youthful breast of a snowy whiteness, which appeared not to rise and fall with the beating of her heart. Her mouth, shaped like the huntress’s bow, fired scornful darts even when she remained silent, and her blue eyes emitted chill gleams to trouble the aplomb of the boldest. Yet she was irresistibly attractive. Her whole person, glittering insolently, roused desire through the provocative challenge of the impossible. No man could view Yolande without falling in love with her, but to be loved by her was a dream that very few allowed themselves to nurture.
How was she dressed? It would take more composure than I possess to say. Her clothes floated around her body like a luminous cloud in which she alone was visible. We believe, however, that clusters of pearls mingled with the wavy locks of her blond hair, which shimmered like the rays of a halo.
Behind the women, and seated on stools and benches, were the noblemen and gentlemen, fathers, husbands, or brothers of these beauties. Some leaned gracefully over the backs of armchairs, murmuring some compliment or other in an indulgent ear, others fanned themselves with the plume of their felt hat, or, standing with one hand on their hip, planted in such a way as to show their fine figure, cast a satisfied glance over the assembly. A murmur of conversation hovered like a light mist above their heads, and the lengthy wait was starting to arouse impatience, when three solemn knocks sounded, and immediately silence reigned.
The curtains slowly parted, revealing a scene depicting a public square, a vague arena, convenient for the intrigues and encounters of simple comedy. It portrayed a crossroads, bordered by houses with pointed gables, projecting floors, small leaded windows, and chimneys from which naively-painted corkscrews of smoke escaped, rising to join the clouds in a painted sky, to which a broom had not been able to wholly restore its original limpidity. One of these houses, forming an angle of the two intersecting streets, which tried to penetrate the canvas by a desperate attempt at perspective, possessed a working door and window. The two wings which united at their summit in an expanse of air, here and there, mapped out in oil-paint, enjoyed the same advantage, moreover, and one of them displayed a balcony which could be reached by means of a ladder invisible to the spectator, an arrangement conducive to conversation, vigorous ascent, and Spanish-style abduction. Our little troupe’s theatre therefore, as you can see, was quite well-engineered for the time. True, the set would have seemed a little childish and wayward to the connoisseur. The roof tiles of the painted houses, caught the eye by the liveliness of their red tones, the foliage of the trees planted in front of the houses was a most beautiful verdigris, and the blue of the sky displayed an improbable azure; but the whole thing gave adequate substance to the idea of a public square among the willing spectators.
A row of twenty-four carefully trimmed candles, unaccustomed to such an occasion, cast a strong light on all this honest decor. Their magnificent appearance caused a murmur of satisfaction among the audience.
The play opened with a quarrel between the good bourgeois Pandolfo and his daughter Isabella, who, under the pretext that she was in love with a young blond-haired suitor, refused, most obstinately, to marry Captain Matamore, with whom her father was taken, a resistance in which Zerbina, her maid, who had been well-paid by Leander, supported her tooth and nail. To the insults addressed to her by Pandolfo, the impudent maid, quick to retort, responded with a hundred witty replies, suggesting that he wed Matamore himself if he loved him so much. As for her, she would never allow her mistress to become the wife of that old fellow with the nasal voice, a scarecrow only good for planting in a vineyard. Furious, the good man, desiring to keep Isabella from her lover, urged Zerbina to make the girl return home; but while seemingly giving way to the old man’s jabs, the latter yet held her ground with such elastic movements of her body, such mischievous twists of the hips, such a coquettish rustling of skirts, that a ballerina by profession could have done no better, and at each useless attempt on Pandolfo’s part, she laughed aloud, without caring for appearances, and showing all thirty-two of her gleaming oriental pearls, which sparkled even more in the candlelight, in such a manner as would have raised the spirits of even that old melancholic Heraclitus. A diamantine glow shone in her eyes, kindled by a layer of rouge beneath each eyelid. The carmine brightened her lips, and her brand-new skirts, made with the taffeta given by the marquis, flashed with sudden shivers of light, and seemed to send out sparks.
The scene was applauded by the whole room, and the lord of Bruyères whispered to himself that he had shown good taste in singling out this pearl among maids.
A new personage then made his entrance, looking to the right and to the left, as if he feared being surprised. It was Leander, the bête noire of fathers, husbands, and guardians, the beloved of wives, daughters and wards; the Lover, in a word, the one dreamt of, awaited, and sought for, who must maintain the promise of the ideal; realise the chimerical worlds of poetry, theatre and the novel; be all youth, passion, and happiness, sharing none of the miseries of humanity; never hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, fearful, weary or ill, but always ready, night and day, to sigh, to coo his declarations of affection, to seduce duennas, to bribe ladies-in-waiting, to climb ladders, to bear a torch in the wind, in case of rivalry or surprise, and all this, while freshly-shaven, hair well-curled, in an elegant coat and a clean shirt, with an eye for appearances, and a heart-shaped mouth, like a waxwork hero! A dreadful profession the reward for which, the winning of every woman’s love, is not overly excessive.
Finding Pandolfo, when he only expected to meet Isabella, Leander halted in a studied pose before the mirror, which he knew would highlight the advantages of his person: his weight resting on his left leg, his right slightly bent, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other caressing his chin so as to make the famous solitaire on his finger shine, his eyes full of fire and languor, his mouth half-open in a faint smile that revealed the enamel of his teeth. He was really very handsome: his costume, refreshed with new ribbons, his shirt, of a dazzling whiteness, emerging betwixt doublet and breeches, his narrow high-heeled shoes, adorned with a large cockade, contributed to giving him the air of a perfect cavalier. Thus, he was completely successful with the ladies; even the scornful Yolande herself did not find him too ridiculous. Taking advantage of this moment of silence, Leander cast a seductive glance over the balustrade towards the Marquise, with a passionate, and supplicating expression which made her blush in spite of herself; then he turned a dull and distracted eye upon Isabella, as if to clearly mark the difference between real love and simulated love.
At the sight of Leander, Pandolfo’s anger turned to exasperation. He escorted his daughter and her maid home, but not before Zerbina had slipped into her pocket a note from Leander addressed to Isabella, requesting a nocturnal rendezvous. The young man, who had followed the father, assured him in the most polite way in the world that his intentions were honest and aimed only at forging the most sacred of bonds, that he was of good birth, esteemed by the nobility, and with some credit at court, and that nothing, not even death, could lead him to relinquish Isabella, whom he loved more than life; a charming speech, to which the girl listened with delight, leaning from her balcony, and aiming pretty little signs of acquiescence at Leander. Despite this mellifluous display of eloquence, Pandolfo, with stubborn, nay senile, persistence, swore by all the gods that Captain Matamore would be his son-in-law, or he would force his daughter to enter a convent. Indeed, he was off, at once, to seek the notary and conclude the matter.
With Pandolfo distant, Leander implored the daughter, who was still at the window as the old man had locked the door tightly, to consent, so as to avoid such an extremity, to his abducting her, and conducting her to a hermit of his acquaintance, who had no qualms about marrying young couples hindered in love by the tyrannical will of their elders. To which the young lady replied, modestly, that while admitting that she was not insensitive to Leander’s love, that one owed respect to those who gave one life, and that the hermit did not perhaps command the best qualifications as regards marriage; but she promised to resist as best she could, and, at all events, to enter the religious life rather than place her hand in that of Captain Matamore.
The lover withdrew to plan his next moves, with the help of a certain valet, a sly and witty character, as fertile in trickery, ruses and stratagems as Polyaenus (see ‘Stratagems in War’ by the second century Macedonian author). He was to return in the evening and, from beneath the balcony, report to his mistress on the success of his enterprises.
Isabella closed her window, and Captain Matamore, made a spirited entrance as was his custom, his appearance, anticipated by the audience, produced a great effect. A favourite comedic character, he had the ability to make even the most morose of people smile.
Though nothing required so vigorous an action, Matamore, striding forward, his legs like the two arms of an open pair of compasses, and taking six-foot long paces, like a line of Horace (the Roman poet, employed dactylic hexameter in his ‘Satires’, where each line contains six metrical feet), reached the pool of light from the candles and planted himself there, in an arched, outrageous and provocative pose, as if he wished to defy the entire room. He twirled his moustaches, rolled his large eyes, made his nostrils quiver, and swelled tremendously, as if he were choking with anger at some insult deserving the destruction of the whole human race.
Matamore, on this solemn occasion, had retrieved, from the depths of his trunk, an almost new costume which he only wore for special performances, and whose lizard-like thinness further highlighted his comical strangeness and grotesquely Spanish air of pomposity. This costume consisted of a doublet shaped like a corselet, and striped with diagonal bands of alternate yellow and red which converged on a row of buttons, in the manner of heraldic chevrons. The points of the doublet hung very low on the stomach. The edges and armholes were trimmed with a prominent band in the same colours; stripes similar to those of the doublet described bizarre spirals around the sleeves and breeches, giving each of his arms and thighs a ridiculous appearance like that of a mirliton (an onion-flute, or eunuch flute with a sound like that of a kazoo, often decorated with spirals in yellow and red). If one were to dare to put red stockings on a cockerel, one would have some idea of Captain Matamore’s shins. Huge yellow pom-poms blossomed like cabbages on his red-slashed shoes; garters, their ends hanging, clasped his legs above the knee, which were as calf-less as the stilt-like legs of a heron. A ruff mounted on cardboard, whose starched folds formed a series of figure eights, encircled his neck and obliged him to raise his chin, an attitude conducive to the impertinent nature of the role. His headdress consisted of a sort of Henri IV felt-hat, turned up at one edge and adorned with red and white feathers. A cloak slashed to reflect the style known as ‘crayfish-beard’ (slashed, cut or ripped upwards from the hem, the pieces hanging down and each like the tail of a crayfish), of the same colours as the rest of the costume, floated behind his shoulders, draped in burlesque fashion over an immense rapier, whose point was elevated due to the weight of its basket hilt. At the end of this length of blade, which could have served as a skewer for half a score of Saracens, hung a rosette delicately worked in very fine archal wire (brass wire covered in cotton thread), signifying a spider’s web, to provide visible proof of the scant use that Matamore made of this terrible implement of war. Those among the spectators who had good eyesight may even have distinguished the little metallic creature itself, suspended at the end of its thread in perfect tranquility, as if sure of never being disturbed in its work.
Matamore, followed by his valet Scapin, whom the former’s rapier threatened to blind, paced the stage two or three times, clicking his heels, pulling his hat down to his eyebrows, and indulging in a hundred ridiculous pantomime gestures that made the spectators swoon with laughter; finally, he ceased, and, placing himself in front of the footlights, began a speech full of boasting, exaggeration, and rodomontades, of which what follows is the approximate content, and which might well have proved to scholars that the author of the play had read the Miles Gloriosus (‘The Braggart Captain’) of the Roman playwright Plautus, ancestor of the whole line of Matamores.
‘…the ability to make even the most morose of people smile’
— ‘For the moment, Scapin, I am willing to leave my killer-blade in her sheath, and leave to the doctors the task of populating the cemeteries for whom I am the great provider. When, as I did, one has dethroned the Sophy of Persia (ruler of the Safavid Dynasty), torn the Amorabaquin (the Ottoman Sultan) by his beard from amidst his camp, and slain with the other hand ten thousand infidel Turks, razed with one kick the ramparts of a hundred fortresses, defied fate, flayed chance, scorched misfortune, plucked like a gosling Jupiter’s eagle when it refused to descend to the field at my call, fearing me more than the Titans, outdone musket-fire with bolts of lightning, and disembowelled the sky with the tips of one’s moustache, it is certainly permissible to allow oneself a little pleasure and entertainment. Besides, the universe, now subjugated, no longer resists my onslaught, and Atropos informs me that, her scissors having been blunted cutting the many threads of fate that my flamberge (long sword) harvested, she has been obliged to send them to the knife-grinder. Therefore, Scapin, I must take my courage in both hands, call a truce to duels, wars, massacres, devastation, the sacking of cities, hand-to-hand battles with giants, the destruction of monsters like to that which Theseus and Hercules achieved, wherein I customarily employ with ferocity my indomitable bravery. I choose to rest. Let Death catch his breath! And in what entertainment does Lord Mars, who is only a very little fellow next to me, spend his Sundays and holidays? In the white, doll-like arms of Lady Venus, who, as a goddess of excellent judgement, prefers men-at-arms to all others, being most disdainful of her lame and cuckold husband (Vulcan). Thus, I too am willing to condescend to appear as an earthling, and seeing that Cupid dared not risk firing his gold-tipped arrow against a valiant knight of my calibre, I have given him a small gesture of encouragement. So that his dart could penetrate this generous lion’s heart of mine, I have stripped off my coat of mail, wrought of the rings gifted me by goddesses, empresses, queens, infantas, princesses and great ladies of all countries, my illustrious lovers, whose magical influence preserves me in my wildest temerities.’
— ‘Which means,’ said Scapin, who had apparently comprehended this dazzling tirade through a supreme mental effort, ‘as far as my feeble understanding can grasp so admirable and eloquent a flow of rhetoric, so marvellously embellished with appropriate terms, and Asiatic metaphors, that your most valiant lordship has taken a keen fancy to some young girl of the city; that is that you are in love, like a mere mortal.’
— ‘Indeed,’ Matamore replied, nonchalantly, and with great good nature, ‘you have plunged straight to the heart the matter, and are not lacking in intelligence for a servant. Yes, I suffer the infirmity of ‘being in love’; but fear not that it will diminish my bravery. It is good for Samson to let himself be shorn, and for Hercules to twirl the distaff. Delilah would never have dared to touch my hair. Omphale would have bent to relieve me of my boots, and at the slightest sign of rebellion, I would have made her scrub the skin of the Nemean lion on her washing board like a Spanish cape. In my moments of leisure, this reflection struck me, humiliating for a heart as great as mine: true, I have conquered the human race, yet I have reduced it only by a half. Women, through their weakness, have escaped my rule. It would be unfitting to cut off their heads, hack off their arms and legs, and split them in two down to the waist, as I usually do with my male enemies. These are martial brutalities, which politeness rejects. The defeat of their hearts, the willing surrender of their souls, the sack of their virtue is enough for me. It is true that I have subdued a vaster number of them than the grains of sand on the shore, or the stars in the sky; that behind me I drag four chests full of billets-doux, love-letters, and missives, and that I sleep on a mattress stuffed with blonde, brown, red and chestnut curls, which even the most modest have sacrificed on my behalf. Hera herself made advances to me which I rejected because her immortality maintains her at a little too over-ripe an age, even though she does renew her virginity every year in the fount of Kanathos (the spring at Nauplia in the Argolid); but all such triumphs I count as defeats, desiring a laurel wreath lacking not a single leaf; else my brow would be dishonoured. The charming Isabella dares to resist me, and though I ever welcome audacity in a fight, I cannot tolerate her impertinence, and desire her to bring me, on a silver platter, the golden keys of her heart, and on her knees, dishevelled, to beg for mercy and grace. Go, call on the inhabitants to surrender. I grant them three minutes of reflection: while I wait, the hourglass will tremble in the hand of craven Time.’
And thereupon, Matamore took on an extravagantly angular pose, the ridiculousness of which was further emphasized by his excessive thinness.
The window, however, remained closed to the servant’s scornful summons. Confident in the strength of the walls, confident that they would not be breached, the garrison, composed of Isabella and Zerbina, gave no sign of life. Matamore, who claimed to be surprised by nothing, was nevertheless astonished by this silence.
‘Blood and fire! Earth and sky! Lightning and cannonades!’ he cried, making the hair on his lip bristle like the whiskers of an angry cat. ‘These scoundrels stir themselves no more than dead goats. Let them raise the flag of surrender, let them beat the drum, or I will raze the house with a flick of my wrist! It would serve her right if the cruel girl was crushed beneath the ruins. How, Scapin, my friend, do you explain this Hyrcanian and savage resistance to my charm which is, as we know, unrivalled on this earthly globe, and even on Olympus inhabited by the gods!’
— ‘I can explain it quite naturally. A certain Leander doubtless less handsome than you, but then not every woman has a refined taste in men, has cultivated an alliance in the place; your valour leads you to attack a conquered fortress. You seduced the father; Leander has seduced the daughter. That is all.’
— ‘Leander, do you say! Ah, repeat not that execrable, and execrated name, or I will, in vile rage, unfix the sun, eclipse the moon, and, gripping Earth by the poles of its axle-tree, shake it, so as to create a diluvial cataclysm like those which afflicted Noah and Ogyges (mythological ruler of ancient Greece)! To pay court to Isabella, the lady of my affections, and beneath my nose! You damnable seducer, you shifty ruffian, you libertine in monk’s dress, where are you, so I may slit your nostrils, carve crosses on your face, skewer you, lard you, pound you, crush you, disembowel you, trample on you, kindle you on a pyre, and scatter your ashes? Should you appear at the height of my fury, the thunderous breath from my nostrils would be enough to send you beyond the stars to face the elemental fires; I would hurl you so high you would never descend. I myself shudder at the thought of what evil and disaster such audacity would bring upon mere humans straggling in my wake. I could find no punishment worthy of the crime that would fail to destroy the planet at the same time. Leander, the rival of Matamore! By Mahound and Tervagant! Words rebel, refusing to express so great an enormity. They resist being joined together; they howl when one takes them by the collar to haul them together, for they know they would have to deal with me if they allowed themselves that license. Now and henceforth, Leander – oh my tongue, pardon me for forcing you to pronounce that infamous name – may consider himself deceased, and may order his own monument from the stonemason, if I prove magnanimous enough to grant him the honour of burial.’
— ‘By Dian’s blood,’ cried the valet, ‘how apt! Here’s Leander himself, crossing the square, with measured step. You can tell him what he has perpetrated, the meeting of two such proud brave suitors, will grant us a magnificent spectacle; for I will not hide from you that, among the fencing masters and officers of the city, this gentleman has the reputation of being a fine fighting man. Draw your blade; as for myself, I’ll keep watch while you are deep in combat, for fear lest the guards disturb you.’
— ‘The mere sparks from our swords will put them to flight; they will not dare, the scoundrels, to enter the sphere of blood and flame. Stay close, my good Scapin; for if, by chance, I am sadly wounded by some blow, you will be there to receive me in your arms,’ replied Matamore, who courted interruption during his duels.
— ‘Stand before him, bravely,’ said the servant, pushing his master on, ‘and block his path.’
Lacking a means of retreat, Matamore pulled his felt hat down over his eyes, twirled his moustache, put his hand on the hilt of his immense rapier, and advanced towards Leander, whom he scanned as insolently as he could; yet it was pure bravado, for one could hear his teeth chattering, and see his thin legs shaking and trembling like reeds in the north wind. He had but one hope left: to intimidate Leander with loud shouts, menaces, and rodomontades; hares often hide beneath lion-skins.
— ‘Sir, know you not that I am Captain Matamore, belonging to the famous house of Cuerno de Cornazan, and allied to the no less illustrious Escobombardon de la Papirontonda family? I am descended from Antaeus through the female line.’
— ‘You may be descended from the moon herself, for all I care,’ replied Leander, with a disdainful shrug of the shoulders; ‘what matters such nonsense to me?’
— ‘Head and belly, sir! It will matter to you, in a moment; there is yet time, quit this place, and I will spare you. Your youth stirs my pity. Look at me closely. I am the terror of the universe, companion to the Grim Reaper, patron of gravediggers; wherever I pass, tombstones rise. My very shadow hardly dares follow me, so ready am I to lead on to danger. If I enter, it is through a breach; if I leave, it is through a triumphal arch; if I advance, it is to cleave; if I retreat, it is to shatter; if I lie down, it is my enemy whom I stretch on the meadow; if I cross a river, it is a river of blood, and the arches of the bridge over which I cross are wrought of the ribs of my adversaries. I race, with joy, through the midst of mêlées, killing, chopping, massacring, cutting and thrusting, piercing with the point. I hurl horses and riders into the air; I snap the bones of elephants like straws. In assaults I scale walls, with a pair of awls in my hands, and plunge my arm into the cannons’ mouths to relieve them of cannonballs. The passing breath of my sword alone overturns battalions like sheaves on the threshing-floor. When Mars meets me on the battlefield, he flees, for fear I will knock him down, God of War though he may be; in sum, my valour is so great, the terror I inspire is such, that until now, the apothecary of Death, I have only viewed the bravest of the brave from behind.’
— ‘Well, now you see one before you!’ cried Leander, dealing one of Captain Matamore’s cheeks an enormous slap, the comedic echo of which echoed from the back wall. The poor devil spun around, almost falling; however, a second slap, no less vigorously applied than the first, but to the other cheek, set him back on his feet.
During this scene, Isabella and Zerbina had reappeared on the balcony. The mischievous maid was holding her sides with laughter, while her mistress signalled in a friendly manner to Leander. From the far end of the square, came Pandolfo, accompanied by the notary, who, from behind his spread fingers, his eyes wide with surprise, watched Leander strike Captain Matamore.
— ‘Crocodiles’ teeth, and rhinoceroses’ horns!’ shouted Captain Matamore, ‘Your grave lies open, you brigand, you scamp, you poltroon, and into it I’ll send you. You’d have been better off tweaking tigers’ whiskers, or snakes’ tails in the forests of India. To annoy Matamore! The Devil, with his pitchfork, wouldn’t risk it. I’d dispossess him of Hell, and seize his Proserpine. Come, my slayer, my blade, come to the light, show yourself in the air, shine in the sun, and let your lightning find its sheath in the belly of this reckless fool. I thirst for his blood, his guts, his marrow; I’ll draw his soul through his teeth.’
As he said this, Matamore, with tensed muscles, rolling eyes, and clicking tongue, appeared to be making the most prodigious efforts to extract the rebellious sword from its sheath. He was sweating with agony, but the prudent blade preferred to stay indoors that day, no doubt so as not to tarnish its polished steel in the humid air.
Tired of his comical contortions, Leander, administering a kick, sent Captain Matamore flying to the other end of the stage, and then withdrew after greeting Isabella with exquisite grace.
Matamore, landing on his back, waved his slender limbs like a grasshopper turned upside down. When, with the help of his servant and Pandolfo, he had risen to his feet, and was quite sure that Leander had departed, he cried out in a breathless voice, as if filled with rage:
— ‘Scapin, come bind me with iron bands; I’ll die of fury, I’ll burst like a bomb! And you, perfidious blade, who betray your master at the supreme moment, is this how you reward me for having watered you with the blood of the proudest captains, and the most valiant duellists! I don't know why I refrain from shattering you into a thousand pieces on my knee, like the coward, perjurer, and felon you are; but you doubtless wish me to understand that the true warrior should remain in the breach, and not lose himself in Capuas (Capua was the Roman city in Campania which defected to Hannibal, and where he idled away his time in luxury) of love. Indeed, this week I have failed to rout even a single army, I have fought neither monsters nor dragons, nor have I supplied Death with his ration of corpses, and my blade has rusted with the shameful rust of idleness! Before my sweetheart’s very eyes, this cowardly fool taunts, insults and provokes me. A profound lesson! A philosophical parable! A moral apologue! Henceforth, I shall slay two or three men before lunch, to be sure that my rapier is freely. Let me remember that!’
— ‘Leander would be obliged to return,’ said Scapin, ‘if we could but pull this formidable steel from its scabbard?’
With Matamore, bracing himself against a paving stone, Scapin heaving at the basket hilt, Pandolfo pulling on the valet, and the notary on Pandolfo, the blade yielded, after a few tugs, to the efforts of the three, who fell to one side, all four limbs in the air, while Captain Matamore fell to the other, his legs twisted, still holding the scabbard of the duelling-sword in his hands.
Rising at once, he retrieved the rapier from Scapin, and cried emphatically: ‘Now Leander is done for; he has but one recourse to escape death: to emigrate to some distant planet. Should he sink to the heart of the earth, I will drag him to the surface and pierce him with my sword, unless I change him to stone with my Medusan eye.’
Despite Matamore’s failure, the obstinate old father, Pandolfo, still harboured no doubts as to the heroism of the captain, and he persisted in his ludicrous plan of wedding this magnificent lord to his daughter. Isabella began to cry, proclaiming that she preferred the convent to such a marriage; Zerbina defended the handsome Leander as best she could, and swore by her virtue, a fine oath indeed, that no such marriage would take place. Matamore attributed his chilly reception to an excess of modesty; well-bred women, not liking to display their passion. Besides, he had not yet paid her court, he had not revealed himself in all his glory, imitating in this fashion the discretion of Jupiter towards Semele, whose fate, for having wished to see her divine lover in all the brilliance of his power, was to be consumed by flames, and reduced to a little pile of ash.
Without heeding him further, the two women returned to the house. Matamore, priding himself on gallantry, had his valet fetch a guitar, set his foot on a convenient post, and began to tickle the belly of the instrument and with it imitate laughter. Then he applied himself to meowing a couplet, in the Andalusian dialect, to accompany a seguidilla, with such bizarre shifts of tone, such strange sounds from his throat, such impossibly high notes, that it sounded like Raminagrobis serenading beneath the White Cat’s balcony (Raminagrobis is a name coined by Rabelais given to an old cat in La Fontaine’s fable ‘Le Chat, la Belette, et le Petit Lapin’, while the White Cat of fairy tale was an enchanted princess).
A can of water poured over him by Zerbina, maliciously, on the pretext of watering the balcony flowers, failed to quench his musical ardour.
— ‘These are doubtless tears of tenderness fallen from Isabella’s beautiful eyes,’ cried Matamore; ‘in myself, the hero is complemented by the virtuoso, for I handle the lyre as brilliantly as the sword.’
Unfortunately for him, Leander, who was prowling nearby, reappeared, roused by the noise of this serenade, and, refusing to permit this scoundrel to make music beneath his mistress’ balcony, snatched the guitar from the hands of Captain Matamore, who was stupefied with fear. Then he struck him a blow on the head with it, a blow so weighty that the belly of the instrument burst, and Captain Matamore, his head poking through, remained caught at the neck as in a Chinese cangue (mobile pillory). Leander, maintaining his hold on the neck of the guitar, began to drag poor Matamore to and fro, with sudden jerks, knocking him against the wings, and drawing him near the candles till he was scorched, a scene as ridiculous as it was amusing. Having entertained himself royally, Leander suddenly let go of Matamore, who fell prone. Judge how the unfortunate Matamore looked in this posture, while seemingly wearing a frying-pan for a collar.
‘…Leander suddenly let go of Matamore who fell prone.’
His misery did not end there. Leander’s valet, with his well-known fertility of imagination, had plotted a stratagem to prevent the marriage of the captain and Isabella. By arrangement, a certain Doralice, very coquettish and bold, appeared, accompanied by a sword-wielding brother, represented by the Tyrant, displaying his most ferocious air, and carrying, beneath his arm, two long rapiers that formed a rather terrifying-looking St. Andrew’s cross. The young lady complained of having been compromised by the said Matamore, then abandoned in favour of Isabella, Pandolfo’s daughter, an outrage that demanded bloody reparation.
— ‘Despatch this cut-throat swiftly,’ said Pandolfo to his future son-in-law, ‘it will be a mere game for you, your incomparable valour having been a match for a whole camp of Saracens.’
Matamore after a thousand entertaining antics, reluctantly placed himself on guard, though he trembled like an aspen, but the swordsman, Doralice’s brother, knocked the sword from his hand, at the first clash of steel, and beat him with the flat of his rapier until he begged for mercy.
To complete this nonsense, Dame Leonarda, dressed as a Spanish duenna, appeared, mopping her owlish eyes with a large handkerchief, and heaving sighs sufficient to split rocks, while waving beneath Pandolfo’s nose a promise of marriage inscribed with Matamore’s signature, which had been counterfeited. A new storm of blows rained down on the wretch convicted of such profound perfidiousness, and he was condemned unanimously to marry Leonarda as punishment for his boasting, rodomontades, and cowardice. Pandolfo, disgusted with Matamore, saw no further obstacle to granting his daughter’s hand to Leander, who had proved a most accomplished gentleman.
This farce, enlivened by the actors’ performances, was warmly applauded. The men found the Soubrette charming, the women did justice to Isabella’s modest grace, and Matamore received praise from all; no better a physique could ever be applied to the role, no emphasis more grotesque, no gestures more fanciful, nor more unexpected. Leander was admired by the fair ladies, though judged a little conceited by the cavaliers. This was the effect he usually produced, and, to tell the truth, he sought no other, preoccupied more with his appearance than his talent. Serafina’s beauty did not lack admirers, and more than one young gentleman, at the risk of displeasing his beautiful neighbour, swore on his moustache that she was an adorable girl.
Sigognac, hidden behind one of the wings, had enjoyed Isabella’s performance, with delight, though he had sometimes felt inwardly jealous of the tender voice she assumed, when responding to Leander, not being yet accustomed to that feigned theatrical love which often hides deep aversion and true enmity. When the play was over, he complimented the young actress with a constrained air, which she noticed, and the cause of which she had no trouble guessing.
— ‘You play the role of a lover admirably, Isabella, and one could even be deceived by it.’
— ‘Is that not my task,’ the girl replied, smilingly, ‘and did not the director of the troupe hire me precisely for that reason?’
— ‘No doubt,’ answered Sigognac, ‘but how sincerely you seemed to love this fop, whose only talent is to show his teeth like a dog being teased, stretch his calf-muscles, and show off his beautiful legs!’
— ‘The role demanded it; should I have stood there like a tree-stump, with an ungainly stance, and surly expression? Have I not, moreover, displayed the modesty of a well-born person? If I have failed in that, tell me, and I will amend my behaviour.’
— ‘Oh! No, you did not. You appeared a modest young lady, carefully brought up in the practice of good manners, and one could not fault your acting, so just, so true, so restrained, that it imitated, to the point of deception, Nature herself.’
— ‘My dear Baron, the lights are being quenched. The company has withdrawn, and we are will find ourselves in darkness. Place this cloak over my shoulders, and show me to my room, if you will.’
Sigognac performed his new role as the cortejador (suitor) to an actress without too much awkwardness, though his hands were trembling a little, and they both left the room, where none remained.
The orangery was located some distance from the château a little to its left, in a large clump of trees. The facade seen from that side was no less magnificent than from the other. As the parkland was at a lower level than the parterre, it was reached via a terrace, adorned with a staircase with pot-bellied balusters separated at intervals by pedestals supporting white and blue earthenware vases, containing shrubs and flowers, the last of the season.
This double-railed staircase, projecting from the terrace’s retaining wall made of large brick panels framed in stone, descended to the ground beyond. The arrangement appeared most majestic.
It might have been about nine in the evening. The moon had risen. A light mist like silver gauze, while softening the contours of objects, did not prevent their being discerned. The façade of the castle was clearly visible, some of its windows illuminated with a red glow, while certain panes, struck by moonlight, sparkled like the scales on a fish. In this light, the pink tones of the brickwork took on the softest of lilac hues; the stonework, pearly-grey ones. From the new slate of the roofs, pale reflections gleamed as from polished steel, and the black teeth of the battlements stood out against a milkily transparent sky. Drops of light fell on the leaves of shrubs, splashed over the enamel of vases, and studded the lawn that stretched in front of the terrace with scattered diamonds. If one gazed into the distance, a spectacle no less enchanting, one saw the paths of the park disappearing, like the Paradisial landscapes of Jan Breughel the Elder, into azure mists and depths, at whose far end silvery gleams sometimes shone, emanating from some marble statue or fountain.
Isabella and Sigognac ascended the staircase and, charmed by the beauty of the night, took a few turns about the terrace before returning to their rooms. As the place was open, and in sight of the castle, the modesty of the young actress conceived little alarm at this nocturnal stroll. Besides, the shyness of the Baron reassured her, and although her role was that of an ingénue, she knew enough about matters of love not to be unaware that a characteristic of genuine passion is respect.
‘…Isabella and Sigognac ascended the staircase.’
Sigognac had made no formal confession of his love for her, but she felt herself loved by him, and feared no harmful action on his part as regards her virtue.
With that charming sense of embarrassment that marks the beginning of love, the young couple, walking arm in arm in the moonlight, in the deserted park, had said only the most insignificant things in the world to each other. Anyone who had spied on them would have been surprised to hear only vague remarks, idle reflections, banal questions and answers. But if the words betrayed no mystery, the trembling of the voices, the accents full of feeling, the silences, the sighs, the low and confidential tone of the conversation, revealed the preoccupations of their souls.
Yolande’s apartment, next to that of the Marquise, overlooked the park, and after her women had undressed her, as the beautiful young girl was gazing, distractedly, through the window at the moon, shining above the tall trees, she saw Isabella and Sigognac on the terrace walking with no other companions than their shadows.
Though the disdainful Yolande, proud as a goddess as she was, assuredly had nothing but contempt for the poor Baron Sigognac, in front of whom, as a dazzling figure in a whirl of noise and light, she passed sometimes, while hunting, and whom lately she had even almost insulted, it nonetheless displeased her to see him beneath her window, beside a young woman to whom he was doubtless speaking of love. She could not accept that he could so easily shake off her influence. He should rather be dying, silently, for her.
She went to bed in somewhat of a bad mood, and found difficulty in falling asleep; the amorous pair filled her thoughts.
Sigognac escorted Isabella back to her room, but as he was about to return to his own, saw, at the end of the corridor, a mysterious figure draped in a cloak, the colour of the wall behind, the hem of which, thrown over his shoulder, hid his face up to his eyes; a pulled-down hat concealed his forehead, and made it impossible to distinguish his features any more than if he had been masked. On seeing Isabella and the Baron, the figure had pressed as close as possible against the wall; it was not one of the actors, who had already retired to their lodgings. The Tyrant was taller, the Pedant fatter, Leander slimmer; it appeared to be neither Scapin nor Captain Matamore, who was recognised everywhere due to his excessive thinness which no coat could conceal.
Not wishing to appear over-curious or bother the stranger, Sigognac hurried to cross the threshold of his room, not without noting, however, that the door of the tapestry room which Zerbina occupied remained discreetly ajar, as if waiting for a visitor who did not wish to be detected.
Once he was inside, an imperceptible creaking of shoes, and the faint sound of a bolt being carefully drawn to, told him that the prowler, so carefully wrapped in his cloak, had reached safety.
An hour or so later, Leander opened his door very quietly, looked to see if the corridor was deserted, and, treading lightly like a gypsy performing the egg dance (Egg dances involve dancing amidst eggs without breaking them, often as part of Easter celebrations, but are not specifically a Romani tradition), reached the staircase, descended it more cautiously and silently than a ghost wandering a haunted castle, followed the wall, taking advantage of the shadows, and headed towards the park towards a grove, or green space, whose centre was occupied by a statue of Amor, with a finger discreetly pressed to his lips. At this spot, no doubt designated in advance, Leander halted, and set himself to wait.
I have said that Leander, interpreting as to his advantage the smile with which the Marquise had acknowledged the greeting he had directed towards her, had dared to write a letter to the Mistress of Bruyères, which Jeanne, seduced by a few pistoles, was commissioned to place, secretly, on her mistress’ dressing table.
This letter, which I have copied, so as to give the reader an idea of the style Leander employed in the seduction of great ladies, a task in which he excelled, ran as follows:
— ‘Madame, or rather Goddess of Beauty, blame your incomparable charms alone for the misfortune they now bring upon you. They force me, by their brilliance, to emerge from the shadows in which I would have remained buried, and approach their light, just as dolphins rise from the depths of the ocean to that cast by the fishermen’s lanterns, even though they find death there, on being pierced mercilessly by the sharp lance-heads of the harpoons. I know only too well that I too will redden the waves with my blood, but as I cannot live like this, it is all the same to me if I die. It is a strange show of audacity to harbour such a pretension, reserved only for demigods, that of receiving the fatal blow from your hand alone. I take the risk, for, being desperate indeed, nothing worse can plague me, and I prefer your wrath to your contempt or disdain. To deliver the coup de grace, one must look upon the victim, and thus, in expiring due to your cruelty, I shall obtain the sovereign sweetness of having been perceived. Yes, I love you, Madame, and if it is a crime, I repent of it not. God suffers to be adored; the stars endure the admiration of the humblest shepherd; it is the fate of a supreme perfection like yours to be capable of being loved only by inferiors, for such perfection has no equal on Earth: and scarcely in the heavens. I am, alas, no more than a poor provincial actor, but even were I a duke or a prince, blessed with all the gifts of fortune, my head would not touch your feet on high, and between your splendour and my nothingness the distance would still be that which lies between the peak and the abyss. To gather a heart, you will ever be obliged to stoop. Mine is, I dare say, Madame, as proud as it is tender, and whoever chose not to reject it would find within the most ardent love, the most perfect delicacy, the most absolute respect, and a boundless devotion. Besides, if such happiness were to befall me, your indulgence would not be obliged perhaps to stoop as low as it imagines. Although reduced, by adverse fate and the jealous enmity of a great man, to this extremity of hiding myself on the stage beneath the disguise of various roles, I am not of a birth to be ashamed of. If I dared to break the vow of secrecy imposed on me for reasons of state, it would be seen that illustrious blood flows in my veins. Whoever loved me would not go astray. But I have already said too much. I will always be merely the humblest and most prostrate of your servants, even if, by one of those acts of recognition which resolve tragic dramas, all were to greet me as the son of a king. Let a sign, the very slightest of signs, allow me to understand that my boldness has not aroused in you too disdainful an anger, and I will expire without regret, scorched by your eyes, on the pyre of my love.’
What would the Marquise’s reply have been to this burning epistle, which had been employed several times previously, perhaps? One would have to know the feminine heart thoroughly to be certain. Unfortunately, the letter failed to arrive at its address. Infatuated with great ladies, Leander did not look to the maids and was not sufficiently gallant towards them. A matter in which he was in error, since they may exercise a deal of influence over the wishes of their mistresses. If the pistoles had been supported by a few kisses, and mischievous embraces, Jeanne’s self-esteem in her role as a chambermaid, which was equal to that of a queen, would have been exercised more zealously and faithfully, by her fulfilling the commission.
As it was, she was holding Leander’s letter in her hand in a careless manner, when she encountered the Marquis who asked her, by way of acknowledgement, not being by nature a curious husband, what the paper might be that she was carrying thus.
— ‘Oh! Nothing much,’ she replied, ‘it is a letter from Monsieur Leander to the Marquise.’
— ‘From Leander, the Lover of this comedy troupe, the one who played the gallant in Captain Matamore’s Rodomontades! What can he be writing about to my wife? No doubt he seeks some kind of reward.’
— ‘That’s not it, I think,’ replied the malicious girl, ‘for, as he handed me the note, he sighed and rolled the whites of his eyes like a swooning lover.’
— ‘Give the letter, to me,’ said the Marquis, ‘and I will answer it. Say nothing to the Marquise. These buffoons are sometimes impertinent, and, spoiled by the indulgence we show them, know not how to keep their place.’
Indeed, the Marquis, who liked to divert himself, replied to Leander in the same style in large and noble handwriting, on paper smelling of musk, the whole sealed with scented Spanish wax and a fanciful coat of arms, to better entertain the poor fellow in his amorous delusion.
When Leander returned to his room after the performance, he found on his dressing table, in the most obvious of places, a letter placed there by a mysterious hand and bearing this inscription: ‘To Monsieur Leander.’ He opened it, trembling with happiness, and read the following:
— ‘As you rightly declare, though too eloquently for my peace of mind, goddesses can only love mortals. At eleven o’clock, when all on Earth is asleep, Diana, no longer fearing the indiscreet gaze of human beings, will leave the heavens and descend to seek the shepherd Endymion. Not on Mount Latmos (as in Greek myth), but in the park, at the foot of the statue of Amor, the discreet, where the handsome shepherd will take care to slumber with closed eyes to protect the modesty of the immortal goddess, who will appear without her retinue of nymphs, wrapped in a cloud, and stripped of her silver rays.’
I leave the reader to imagine what wild joy flooded Leander’s heart upon reading this note, which surpassed his most extravagant hopes. He poured a bottle of perfume over his hair and hands, chewed a piece of mace to freshen his breath, brushed his teeth, twisted the tips of his curls to make them curlier still, and took himself to the park and the spot indicated, where, in order to relate all this, we have left him waiting.
The feverish effort of doing so, and also the nocturnal chill caused him to shiver anxiously. He shuddered at the fall of a leaf, and strained his ears at the slightest noise, his sense of hearing trained to catch the whisper of the stage prompter in an instant. The sand squeaking beneath his feet, seemed to make a vast noise that must surely be heard from the castle. In spite of himself, a sacred dread of the woods invaded his thoughts, and the tall black trees troubled his imagination. He was not afraid exactly, but his thoughts had taken rather a gloomy turn. The Marquise was a little late; Diana was leaving Endymion with his feet steeped in the dew for far too long. At a particular moment, he thought he heard a dead branch crack beneath rather a heavy step. It could scarcely be that of his goddess. Goddesses glide along a ray of light, and reach the ground without bending the tip of a single blade of grass.
‘If the Marquise does not hasten, instead of a passionate lover, she will find but a frozen shadow,’ thought Leander; ‘this waiting-about, where one merely broods inwardly, does little for Cytherean gallantry.’ He was at this point in his reflections when four giant shadows, emerging from the trees and from behind the statue’s pedestal, approached him in a concerted movement. Two of these shadows, cast by the bodies of a pair of mighty rascals, lackeys in the service of the Marquis de Bruyères, seized the actor’s arms, and held them like those of a captive being bound, while the other two began to beat him, rhythmically. The blows rang on his back like hammers on an anvil. Not wanting to attract people by his cries, and make his misfortune known, the poor man bore his pain heroically. Mucius Scevola (Gaius Mucius Cordus, known by his later cognomen Scaevola, famous for his bravery, in 508 BC, during the war between Rome and Clusium), showed no more composed a countenance with his fist in the fire, than Leander beneath their blows.
The punishment over, the four executioners released their victim, bowed low, and withdrew without saying a word.
What a shameful downfall! Icarus (who, according to the Greek myth, flew too near the sun on wings made by his father Daedalus), plunging from the heights of heaven, made no steeper a one. Bruised, broken, crushed, Leander, hobbling back to the château, back bent, and rubbing his ribs; but his vanity was so great that the idea of having been hoaxed did not come to him. His self-esteem found it more expedient to give the adventure a tragic turn. He told himself that, without doubt, the Marquise, spied on by a jealous husband, had been followed, kidnapped before arriving at the rendezvous, and forced, with a dagger at her throat, to confess everything. He pictured her on her knees, dishevelled, begging mercy of the Marquis who was furious with anger, and, while shedding tears in abundance, promising to resist more vigorously in future such surprises aimed at her heart. Even though he was sore from the beating, Leander pitied her for having placed herself in such danger on account of himself, not suspecting that she was wholly ignorant of the proceedings, and was at that hour resting very peacefully between her Holland linen sheets, bathed in sandalwood and cinnamon.
As he navigated the corridor, Leander was annoyed to see Scapin, peering through the gap in a half-open door, and sneering maliciously. He straightened himself as best he could, but the wicked fellow was not fooled.
The next day, the troop made their preparations for departure. The oxcart was abandoned as too slow, and the Tyrant, well paid by the Marquis, hired a large four-horse wagon to carry the troupe and their luggage. Leander and Zerbina rose late, for reasons that need not be further explained; one of the two had a doleful and pitiful expression, though he tried to put a brave face on it, while the other beamed with ambition satisfied. She even showed herself to be a kind princess to her companions, and the Duenna, a serious move this, drew closer to her with a flattering obsequiousness she had never shown before. Scapin, who missed nothing, noticed that Zerbina’s trunk had doubled in weight through some magic spell or other. Serafina bit her lips, murmuring the word: ‘Creature!’ which the Soubrette pretended not to hear, content for the moment with having humiliated the grande coquette.
At last, the cart moved off, and they left the hospitable Château de Bruyères, a fact which all regretted, except Leander.
‘…They left the hospitable Château de Bruyères.’
The Tyrant was thinking of the pistoles he had received; the Pedant, of the excellent wine he had drunk, in large quantities; Matamore, of the applause he had received; Zerbina, of the pieces of taffeta, gold necklaces and other gifts she had received; while Sigognac and Isabella thought only of their love, and, happy to be together, stole not a single glance, not even for one last time, at the blue roofs and vermilion walls of the castle on the horizon.
The End of Part I of Gautier’s ‘Le Capitaine Fracasse’