"It is this cursed ring!" he cried, "which pressed into my finger and
made me miss a sure thing."
With some difficulty he took off his diamond ring, and I went nearer to
take it, but he forestalled me, ran to the Venus, slipped the ring on
its fourth finger, and retook his position at the head of his townsmen.
He was pale, but cool and determined. From that time he made no more
fouls, and the Spaniards were completely beaten. The enthusiasm of the
spectators was a fine sight: some uttered shrieks of delight and threw
their caps in the air: others shook hands with him and called him the
pride of their countryside. If he had repulsed an invasion, I doubt if
he would have received heartier or more sincere congratulations. The
disappointment of the vanquished added still more to the brilliance of
his victory.
"We must have another match, my fine fellow," he said to the muleteer
from Aragon in a condescending tone; "but I must give you odds."
I would have preferred M. Alphonse to be more modest, and I was almost
sorry for his rival's humiliation.
The Spanish giant felt the insult keenly; I saw him go pale under his
tanned skin. He looked miserably at his racquet and ground his teeth;
then, in a choking voice he said, "Me lo pagarás."[1]
The voice of M. de Peyrehorade interrupted his son's triumph; my host
was extremely astonished not to find him superintending the preparation
of the new carriage, and was even more surprised to see him with racquet
in hand, flushed from the game.
M. Alphonse ran to the house, bathed his face and hands, put on his new
coat again and his patent-leather shoes, and five minutes after we were
in full trot on the road to Puygarrig. All the tennis players of the
town and a large crowd of spectators followed us with shouts of joy. The
stout horses which drew us could hardly keep ahead of these dauntless
Catalanians.
We were at Puygarrig, and the procession was forming into order to walk
to the registry when M. Alphonse suddenly put his hand up to his head
and whispered to me--
"What a blunder! I have forgotten the ring! It is on Venus's finger,
devil take her! Do not tell my mother, whatever happens. Perhaps she
will not notice the omission."
"You could send someone for it," I said.
"No! my servant has stayed behind at Ille. I dare hardly trust these
fellows here with twelve hundred francs of diamonds. What a temptation
that will be to someone! Besides, what would the people here think of my
absent-mindedness? They would make fun of me. They would call me the
husband of the statue.... If only no one steals it! Fortunately, the
idol frightens the young rascals. They dare not go within arm's length
of her. Well, it doesn't matter, I have another ring."
The two ceremonies, civil and religious, were accomplished with suitable
state. Mademoiselle de Puygarrig received the ring which had belonged to
a Paris milliner, little thinking that her _fiancé_ had sacrificed
another's love-token to her. Then we sat down and drank, ate and sang
for long enough. I was sorry the bride had to bear the coarse jollity
which went on all around her; however, she took it with a better face
than I should have thought possible, and her embarrassment was neither
awkward nor affected. Possibly courage springs up under occasions that
need it.
The banquet broke up Lord knows when--somewhere about four o'clock. The
men went for a walk in the park, which was a magnificent one, or watched
the peasants of Puygarrig dance on the Castle lawn, decked in their gala
dresses.
In this way we passed several hours. In the meantime the women thronged
round the bride, who showed them her wedding presents. Then she changed
her toilette, and I noticed that she covered up her beautiful hair with
a cap and a hat with feathers in it, for wives are most particular to
don as quickly as possible those adornments which custom has forbidden
them to wear when they are still unmarried.
It was nearly eight o'clock when we were ready to go back to Ille. But
there was a pathetic scene first between Mademoiselle de Puygarrig and
her aunt, who had been a mother to her, and was of advanced age and very
religious: she had not been able to go to the town with us. At her
departure she gave her niece a touching sermon on her wifely duties,
which resulted in a flood of tears and endless embracings. M. de
Peyrehorade compared this parting to the Rape of the Sabines. However,
we got off at last, and during the journey everyone exerted himself to
cheer up the bride and make her laugh, but in vain.
At Ille supper awaited us; and _what_ a supper! If the morning's coarse
revel had shocked me, I was still more disgusted by the quips and jokes
which circled round the bride and bridegroom. The bridegroom, who had
disappeared for an instant before sitting down to supper, was pale and
as chilly as an iceberg. He drank the old wine of Collioure constantly,
which is almost as strong as brandy. I was on one side of him, and felt
I must warn him--
"Do take care. They say this wine--"
I don't know what silly thing I said to him to show myself in harmony
with the merry-makers.
"When they get up from the table I have something to say to you," he
whispered, pushing my knee.
His solemn tone surprised me. I looked at him more attentively, and
noticed a strange alteration in his features.
"Do you feel ill?" I asked.
"No."
And he began to drink again.
In the meantime, in the midst of cries and clapping hands, a child of
eleven, who had slipped under the table, showed to the company a pretty
white and rose-coloured ribbon which she had just taken from the bride's
ankle. They called it her garter. It was soon cut into bits and
distributed among the young people, who decorated their button-holes
with it, according to a very old custom which is still preserved in a
few patriarchal families. This made the bride blush to the whites of her
eyes. But her confusion reached its height when M. de Peyrehorade, after
calling for silence, sang some Catalanian verses to her, which he said
were impromptus. I give the sense so far as I understood it.
"What is the matter with me, my friends? Has the wine I have taken made
me see double? There are two Venuses here...."
The bridegroom turned round suddenly and looked scared, which set
everybody laughing.
"Yes," continued M. de Peyrehorade, "there are two Venuses under my
roof. One I found in the earth, like a truffle; the other came down to
us from the heavens to share her girdle with us."
He meant, of course, her garter.
"My son, choose between the Roman and the Catalanian Venus which you
prefer. The rascal took the Catalanian, the better part, for the Roman
is black and the Catalanian is white. The Roman is cold, and the
Catalanian sets on fire all who come near her."
This conclusion excited such an uproar of noisy applause and loud
laughter that I thought the roof would fall on our heads. There were but
three grave faces at the table--those of the wedded pair and mine. I had
a splitting headache; for besides, I know not why, a marriage always
makes me feel melancholy. This one disgusted me rather, too.
The last couplets were sung by the deputy-mayor, and, I may say, they
were very broad; then we went into the salon to witness the departure of
the bride, who would soon be conducted to her chamber, as it was nearly
midnight.
M. Alphonse drew me aside into the recess of a window, and said, as he
turned his eyes away from me--
"You will laugh at me ... but I do not know what is the matter with
me.... I am bewitched, devil take it!"
My first thought was that he fancied he was threatened with some
misfortune of the nature of those referred to by Montaigne and Madame
de Sévigné: "The whole realm of love is filled with tragic stories."
I thought to myself that this kind of mishap only happens to men of
genius.
"You have drunk too much Collioure wine, my dear M. Alphonse," I said.
"I warned you."
"That may be. But this is something much more terrible."
His voice was broken, and I thought he was quite drunk.
"You know my ring?" he continued, after a pause.
"Yes. Has it been taken?"
"No."
"Therefore you have it?"
"No--I--I could not get it off the finger of that devil of a Venus."
"Nonsense! you did not pull hard enough."
"Yes, I did.... But the Venus ... has clenched her finger."
He looked at me fixedly with a haggard expression, and leant against the
framework to keep himself from falling.
"What a ridiculous tale!" I said. "You pushed the ring on too far.
To-morrow you must use pincers, only take care not to injure the statue.
"No, I tell you. The finger of Venus has contracted and bent up; she
closed her hand, do you hear?... She is my wife apparently, because I
gave her my ring.... She will not give it back."
I shivered suddenly, and for a moment my blood ran cold. Then the deep
sigh he gave sent a breath of wine into my face and all my emotion
disappeared.
"The wretched man is completely drunk," I thought.
"You are an antiquarian, Monsieur," the bridegroom added in dismal
tones; "you know all about such statues.... There is perhaps some
spring, some devilish catch, I do not know of. If you would go and see."
"Willingly," I said. "Come with me."
"No, I would rather you went by yourself."
So I left the salon.
The weather had changed during supper, and rain began to fall heavily. I
was going to ask for an umbrella, when I stopped short and reflected. "I
should be a great fool," I said to myself, "to go and verify the tale of
a tipsy man! Perhaps, besides, he intended to play some stupid joke on
me to amuse the country people; and at the least I should be wet through
to the skin and catch a bad cold."
I cast a glance on the dripping statue from the door, and went up to my
room without returning to the salon. I went to bed, but sleep was long
in coming. All the scenes that had occurred during the day returned to
my mind. I thought of that beautiful, innocent young girl given up to a
drunken brute. "What a detestable thing," I said to myself, "is a
marriage of convenience! A mayor puts on a tricoloured sash, and a
priest a stole, and behold, the noblest of girls may be dedicated to the
Minotaur. What can two beings who do not love each other say at such a
moment, a moment that lovers would buy at the price of life itself? Can
a wife ever love a man whom she has once discovered is coarse-minded?
First impressions can never be obliterated, and I am certain M. Alphonse
deserves to be hated."
During my monologue, which I abridge considerably, I had heard much
coming and going about the house, doors open and shut, and carriages go
away; then I thought I could hear the light steps of several women upon
the staircase proceeding to the end of the passage opposite my room. It
was probably the procession leading the bride to bed. Then they went
downstairs again, and Madam de Peyrehorade's door shut. "How unhappy and
strangely ill at ease that poor girl must feel!" I said to myself. I
turned over on my bed in a bad temper. A bachelor cuts but a poor figure
at a house where there is a wedding going on.
Silence had reigned for a long while, when it was interrupted by heavy
steps coming up the stairs. The wooden stairs creaked loudly.
"What a clumsy lout!" I cried. "I bet he will fall down stairs."
Then all became quiet again. I took up a book to change the current of
my thoughts. It was a treatise on the Statistics of the Department,
embellished with a preface by M. de Peyrehorade on the "Druidical
Monuments of the Arrondissement of Prades." I fell into a doze at the
third page.
I slept badly and waked several times. It must have been five in the
morning, and I had been awake more than twenty minutes when the cock
began to crow. Day had dawned. Then I distinctly heard the same heavy
steps and the same creaking of the stairs that I had heard before I went
to sleep. It struck me as very strange. I tried amidst my yawning to
guess why M. Alphonse should rise so early; I could not think of any
reason at all likely. I was going to close my eyes again when my
attention was afresh excited by strange trampings, which were soon
intermingled with the ringing of bells and the banging of doors, and
then I could distinguish confused cries.
The drunken bridegroom must have set fire to the house! And at this
reflection I leapt out of bed.
I dressed rapidly and went into the corridor. From the opposite end
proceeded cries and wailings, and one piercing cry sounded above all the
others--"My son! my son!" Evidently some accident had happened to M.
Alphonse. I ran to the bridal-chamber; it was full of people. The first
sight which met my eyes was the young man, half-dressed, stretched
across the bed, the wood of which was broken. He was livid and
motionless, and his mother wept and cried by his side. M. de Peyrehorade
was busy rubbing his son's temples with eau de Cologne and holding
smelling salts under his nose. Alas! his son had been dead a long time.
Upon a couch at the other end of the room was the bride in the grip of
terrible convulsions. She uttered inarticulate cries, and two strapping
servants had the greatest difficulty in holding her down.
"My God!" I exclaimed, "what has happened?"
I went to the bedside and raised the body of the unfortunate young man;
he was already cold and stiff. His clenched teeth and black face denoted
the most frightful agony. It could be easily seen that his death had
been violent and his agony terrible. There was, however, no trace of
blood on his clothes. I opened his shirt and found a livid mark on his
breast, which extended down his sides and back. One would have thought
he had been strangled by a band of iron. My foot stumbled on something
hard which was under the rug; I stooped and saw the diamond ring.
I led M. de Peyrehorade and his wife away into their room; then I had
the bride carried out.
"You have a daughter left," I said to them; "you must give all your care
to her." I then left them to themselves.
There seemed to me no doubt that M. Alphonse had been the victim of an
assassination, and the perpetrators must have found some means to get
into the bride's room during the night. Those bruises, however, on the
chest and the circular direction of them puzzled me much, for neither a
stick nor a bar of iron could have produced them. Suddenly I recollected
to have heard that in Valence the bravoes use long leather bags full of
fine sand to smother people whom they want to kill. Soon, too, I
remembered the muleteer from Aragon and his threat, though I could
hardly think that he would take such a terrible vengeance on a light
jest.
I went into the house and hunted all over for any traces of their having
broken into the house, but I found none whatever. I went to the garden
to see if the assassins had got in from there, but I could not find any
sure indication. Last night's rain had, moreover, so soaked the ground
that it would not have retained the clearest imprint. But I noticed,
notwithstanding, several deep footmarks in the earth; they were in two
contrary directions, but in the same line, beginning at the corner of
the hedge next to the tennis ground and ending at the front door to the
house. These might have been the footmarks made by M. Alphonse when he
went to look for his ring on the statue's finger. On the other side the
hedge at that spot was not so thick, and it must have been here that the
murderers made their escape. Passing and repassing in front of the
statue, I stopped short a second to look at it. I confess that this time
I could not look at its expression of ironical wickedness without fear,
and my head was so full of the ghastly scenes I had just witnessed that
I seemed to be looking at an infernal divinity which gloated over the
misfortunes that had fallen on the house.
I regained my room and remained there until noon. Then I went down and
asked for news of my host and hostess. They were a little calmer.
Mademoiselle de Puygarrig--or rather the widow of M. Alphonse--had
regained consciousness; she had even spoken to the magistrate of
Perpignan, then on a tour of inspection in Ille, and this magistrate had
taken down her statement. He asked me for mine. I told him what I knew,
and did not conceal my suspicions regarding the muleteer from Aragon. He
gave orders for his instant arrest.
"Have you learnt anything from Madam Alphonse?" I asked the magistrate,
when my deposition had been taken down and signed.
"That unhappy young lady has gone mad," he said, with a sad smile; "mad,
completely mad. See what she told me:--
"'She had been in bed,' she said, 'for some moments with the curtains
drawn, when the bedroom door opened and someone came in.' Now Madam
Alphonse lay on the side of the bed, with her face turned to the wall.
She did not stir, supposing it to be her husband. In a second the bed
creaked as though it were burdened with an enormous weight. She was
terribly frightened, but dared not turn round. Five minutes, or perhaps
ten--she could not tell how long--passed. Then she made an involuntary
movement, or else the other person who was in the bed made one, and she
felt the touch of something as cold as ice--these are her very words.
She sat up in the bed, trembling in every limb. Shortly after the door
opened again, and someone entered, who said, 'Good night, my little
wife,' and soon after the curtains were drawn. She heard a stifled cry.
The person who was in bed by her side sat up, and seemed to stretch out
its arms in front. Then she turned her head round ... and saw, so she
says, her husband on his knees by the bed, with his head as high as the
pillow, in the arms of a green-looking giant who was strangling him with
all its might. She said--and she repeated it to me over and over twenty
times, poor lady!--she said that she recognised ... Can you guess? The
bronze statue of Venus belonging to M. de Peyrehorade.... Since it came
into the country everybody dreams of it, but I will proceed with the
story of the unhappy mad girl. She lost consciousness at this sight, and
probably for some time her reason. She cannot in any way tell how long
she remained in a faint. When she came to she saw the phantom again--or
the statue, as she persists in calling it--motionless, its legs and the
lower half of the body in the bed, the bust and arms stretched out
before it, and between its arms her lifeless husband. A cock crew, and
then the statue got out of the bed, dropped the dead body, and went out.
Madam Alphonse hung on to the bell, and you know the rest."
They brought in the Spaniard; he was calm, and defended himself with
much coolness and presence of mind. He did not attempt to deny the
remark I heard; he explained it by pretending that he meant nothing by
it, but that on the following day, when he was more rested, he would
have won a tennis match against his victor. I remember that he had
added--
"A native of Aragon does not wait for his revenge till to-morrow when he
is insulted. Had I thought M. Alphonse meant to insult me, I should have
immediately stabbed him with my knife to the heart."
His shoes were compared with the footmarks in the garden; but his shoes
were much larger than the marks.
Finally, the innkeeper with whom the man had lodged averred that he had
spent the whole of that night in rubbing and doctoring one of his sick
mules.
Moreover, this man from Aragon was quite noted and well known in the
countryside, to which he came annually to trade. He was therefore
released with many apologies.
I had forgotten the deposition of a servant who had been the last to
see M. Alphonse alive. He saw him go upstairs to his wife, and he had
called the man and asked him in an anxious manner if he knew where I
was. Then M. Alphonse heaved a sigh, and stood for a moment in silence,
adding afterwards--
"Well, the devil must have carried him off too!"
I asked this man if M. Alphonse had his diamond ring on when he spoke to
him. The servant hesitated before he replied; then he said that he
thought not, that at all events it had not attracted his attention. "If
he had worn that ring," he added, correcting himself, "I should
certainly have noticed it, because I believed that he had given it to
Madam Alphonse."
Whilst I interrogated this man I felt a little of the superstitious
terror that Madam Alphonse's deposition had spread throughout the house.
The magistrate looked at me and smiled, and I refrained from pressing my
questions any further.
A few hours after the funeral of M. Alphonse I prepared to leave Ille.
M. de Peyrehorade's carriage was to take me to Perpignan. In spite of
his state of feebleness the poor old man would accompany me to the gate
of his grounds. He walked to it in silence, hardly able to drag himself
along even with the help of my arm. Just as we were parting I cast a
last glance at the Venus. I could see plainly that my host, although he
did not share the terrors and hatred that his family felt for it, would
like to get rid of the object that would ever afterwards remind him of a
frightful disaster. I resolved to try and persuade him to put it in a
museum. I was hesitating to begin the subject when M. de Peyrehorade
mechanically turned his head in the direction in which he saw me looking
so attentively. He saw the statue, and immediately burst into tears. I
embraced him, and, without venturing to say a single word, I stepped
into the carriage.
Since my departure I have never learnt that anything was discovered to
throw light on this mysterious catastrophe.
M. de Peyrehorade died some months after his son. He bequeathed me his
manuscripts in his will, which some day I may publish. But I have not
been able to find the treatise relating to the inscriptions on the
Venus.
* * * * *
P.S.--My friend M. de P. has just written to me from Perpignan to tell
me that the statue no longer exists. After her husband's death, the
first thing Madam de Peyrehorade did was to have it melted down and made
into a bell, and in this fresh form it is used in the church at Ille.
But, adds M. de P., it would seem that an evil fate pursues those who
possess that piece of bronze. Since that bell began to ring in Ille the
vines have twice been frost-bitten.
1837.
[1] "But you will pay for it."