In 1617, twenty and some years after the horrible night during which
Etienne came into the world, the Duc d’Herouville, then seventy-six
years old, broken, decrepit, almost dead, was sitting at sunset in an
immense arm-chair, before the gothic window of his bedroom, at the place
where his wife had so vainly implored, by the sounds of the horn wasted
on the air, the help of men and heaven. You might have thought him a
body resurrected from the grave. His once energetic face, stripped of
its sinister aspect by old age and suffering, was ghastly in color,
matching the long meshes of white hair which fell around his bald head,
the yellow skull of which seemed softening. The warrior and the fanatic
still shone in those yellow eyes, tempered now by religious sentiment.
Devotion had cast a monastic tone upon the face, formerly so hard, but
now marked with tints which softened its expression. The reflections of
the setting sun colored with a faintly ruddy tinge the head, which, in
spite of all infirmities, was still vigorous. The feeble body, wrapped
in brown garments, gave, by its heavy attitude and the absence of all
movement, a vivid impression of the monotonous existence, the terrible
repose of this man once so active, so enterprising, so vindictive.
“Enough!” he said to his chaplain.
That venerable old man was reading aloud the Gospel, standing before the
master in a respectful attitude. The duke, like an old menagerie lion
which has reached a decrepitude that is still full of majesty, turned to
another white-haired man and said, holding out a fleshless arm covered
with sparse hairs, still sinewy, but without vigor:--
“Your turn now, bonesetter. How am I to-day?”
“Doing well, monseigneur; the fever has ceased. You will live many years
yet.”
“I wish I could see Maximilien here,” continued the duke, with a smile
of satisfaction. “My fine boy! He commands a company in the King’s
Guard. The Marechal d’Ancre takes care of my lad, and our gracious Queen
Marie thinks of allying him nobly, now that he is created Duc de Nivron.
My race will be worthily continued. The lad performed prodigies of valor
in the attack on--”
At this moment Bertrand entered, holding a letter in his hand.
“What is this?” said the old lord, eagerly.
“A despatch brought by a courier sent to you by the king,” replied
Bertrand.
“The king, and not the queen-mother!” exclaimed the duke. “What is
happening? Have the Huguenots taken arms again? Tete-Dieu!” cried the
old man, rising to his feet and casting a flaming glance at his three
companions, “I’ll arm my soldiers once more, and, with Maximilien at my
side, Normandy shall--”
“Sit down, my good seigneur,” said Beauvouloir, uneasy at seeing the
duke give way to an excitement that was dangerous to a convalescent.
“Read it, Maitre Corbineau,” said the old man, holding out the missive
to his confessor.
These four personages formed a tableau full of instruction upon human
life. The man-at-arms, the priest, and the physician, all three standing
before their master, who was seated in his arm-chair, were casting
pallid glances about them, each presenting one of those ideas which end
by possessing the whole man on the verge of the tomb. Strongly illumined
by a last ray of the setting sun, these silent men composed a picture
of aged melancholy fertile in contrasts. The sombre and solemn chamber,
where nothing had been changed in twenty-five years, made a frame for
this poetic canvas, full of extinguished passions, saddened by death,
tinctured by religion.
“The Marechal d’Ancre has been killed on the Pont du Louvre by order of
the king, and--O God!”
“Go on!” cried the duke.
“Monsieur le Duc de Nivron--”
“Well?”
“Is dead!”
The duke dropped his head upon his breast with a great sigh, but was
silent. At those words, at that sigh, the three old men looked at each
other. It seemed to them as though the illustrious and opulent house of
Herouville was disappearing before their eyes like a sinking ship.
“The Master above,” said the duke, casting a terrible glance at the
heavens, “is ungrateful to me. He forgets the great deeds I have
performed for his holy cause.”
“God has avenged himself!” said the priest, in a solemn voice.
“Put that man in the dungeon!” cried the duke.
“You can silence me far more easily than you can your conscience.”
The duke sank back in thought.
“My house to perish! My name to be extinct! I will marry! I will have a
son!” he said, after a long pause.
Though the expression of despair on the duke’s face was truly awful, the
bonesetter could not repress a smile. At that instant a song, fresh as
the evening breeze, pure as the sky, equable as the color of the ocean,
rose above the murmur of the waves, to cast its charm over Nature
herself. The melancholy of that voice, the melody of its tones shed,
as it were, a perfume rising to the soul; its harmony rose like a vapor
filling the air; it poured a balm on sorrows, or rather it consoled them
by expressing them. The voice mingled with the gurgle of the waves so
perfectly that it seemed to rise from the bosom of the waters. That song
was sweeter to the ears of those old men than the tenderest word of love
on the lips of a young girl; it brought religious hope into their souls
like a voice from heaven.
“What is that?” asked the duke.
“The little nightingale is singing,” said Bertrand; “all is not lost,
either for him or for us.”
“What do you call a nightingale?”
“That is the name we have given to monseigneur’s eldest son,” replied
Bertrand.
“My son!” cried the old man; “have I a son?--a son to bear my name and
to perpetuate it!”
He rose to his feet and began to walk about the room with steps in turn
precipitate and slow. Then he made an imperious gesture, sending every
one away from him except the priest.
The next morning the duke, leaning on the arm of his old retainer
Bertrand, walked along the shore and among the rocks looking for the son
he had so long hated. He saw him from afar in a recess of the granite
rocks, lying carelessly extended in the sun, his head on a tuft of mossy
grass, his feet gracefully drawn up beneath him. So lying, Etienne was
like a swallow at rest. As soon as the tall old man appeared upon the
beach, the sound of his steps mingling faintly with the voice of the
waves, the young man turned his head, gave the cry of a startled bird,
and disappeared as if into the rock itself, like a mouse darting so
quickly into its hole that we doubt if we have even seen it.
“Hey! tete-Dieu! where has he hid himself?” cried the duke, reaching the
rock beside which his son had been lying.
“He is there,” replied Bertrand, pointing to a narrow crevice, the edges
of which had been polished smooth by the repeated assaults of the high
tide.
“Etienne, my beloved son!” called the old man.
The hated child made no reply. For hours the duke entreated, threatened,
implored in turn, receiving no response. Sometimes he was silent, with
his ear at the cleft of the rock, where even his enfeebled hearing could
detect the beating of Etienne’s heart, the quick pulsations of which
echoed from the sonorous roof of his rocky hiding-place.
“At least _he_ lives!” said the old man, in a heartrending voice.
Towards the middle of the day, the father, reduced to despair, had
recourse to prayer:--
“Etienne,” he said, “my dear Etienne, God has punished me for disowning
you. He has deprived me of your brother. To-day you are my only child.
I love you more than I love myself. I see the wrong I have done; I know
that you have in your veins my blood with that of your mother, whose
misery was my doing. Come to me; I will try to make you forget my
cruelty; I will cherish you for all that I have lost. Etienne, you are
the Duc de Nivron, and you will be, after me, the Duc d’Herouville, peer
of France, knight of the Orders and of the Golden Fleece, captain of a
hundred men-at-arms, grand-bailiff of Bessin, Governor of Normandy,
lord of twenty-seven domains counting sixty-nine steeples, Marquis de
Saint-Sever. You shall take to wife the daughter of a prince. Would you
have me die of grief? Come! come to me! or here I kneel until I see you.
Your old father prays you, he humbles himself before his child as before
God himself.”
The hated son paid no heed to this language bristling with social
ideas and vanities he did not comprehend; his soul remained under the
impressions of unconquerable terror. He was silent, suffering great
agony. Towards evening the old seigneur, after exhausting all formulas
of language, all resources of entreaty, all repentant promises, was
overcome by a sort of religious contrition. He knelt down upon the sand
and made a vow:--
“I swear to build a chapel to Saint-Jean and Saint-Etienne, the patrons
of my wife and son, and to found one hundred masses in honor of the
Virgin, if God and the saints will restore to me the affection of my
son, the Duc de Nivron, here present.”
He remained on his knees in deep humility with clasped hands, praying.
Finding that his son, the hope of his name, still did not come to him,
great tears rose in his eyes, dry so long, and rolled down his withered
cheeks. At this moment, Etienne, hearing no further sounds, glided to
the opening of his grotto like a young adder craving the sun. He saw the
tears of the stricken old man, he recognized the signs of a true grief,
and, seizing his father’s hand, he kissed him, saying in the voice of an
angel:--
“Oh, mother! forgive me!”
In the fever of his happiness the old duke lifted his feeble offspring
in his arms and carried him, trembling like an abducted girl, toward
the castle. As he felt the palpitation of his son’s body he strove to
reassure him, kissing him with all the caution he might have shown in
touching a delicate flower; and speaking in the gentlest tones he had
ever in his life used, in order to soothe him.
“God’s truth! you are like my poor Jeanne, dear child!” he said. “Teach
me what would give you pleasure, and I will give you all you can desire.
Grow strong! be well! I will show you how to ride a mare as pretty and
gentle as yourself. Nothing shall ever thwart or trouble you. Tete-Dieu!
all things bow to me as the reeds to the wind. I give you unlimited
power. I bow to you myself as the god of the family.”
The father carried his son into the lordly chamber where the mother’s
sad existence had been spent. Etienne turned away and leaned against the
window from which his mother was wont to make him signals announcing
the departure of his persecutor, who now, without his knowing why, had
become his slave, like those gigantic genii which the power of a
fairy places at the order of a young prince. That fairy was Feudality.
Beholding once more the melancholy room where his eyes were accustomed
to contemplate the ocean, tears came into those eyes; recollections of
his long misery, mingled with melodious memories of the pleasures he had
had in the only love that was granted to him, maternal love, all
rushed together upon his heart and developed there, like a poem at once
terrible and delicious. The emotions of this youth, accustomed to live
in contemplations of ecstasy as others in the excitements of the world,
resembled none of the habitual emotions of mankind.
“Will he live?” said the old man, amazed at the fragility of his heir,
and holding his breath as he leaned over him.
“I can live only here,” replied Etienne, who had heard him, simply.
“Well, then, this room shall be yours, my child.”
“What is that noise?” asked the young man, hearing the retainers of
the castle who were gathering in the guard-room, whither the duke had
summoned them to present his son.
“Come!” said the father, taking him by the hand and leading him into the
great hall.
At this epoch of our history, a duke and peer, with great possessions,
holding public offices and the government of a province, lived the life
of a prince; the cadets of his family did not revolt at serving him.
He had his household guard and officers; the first lieutenant of his
ordnance company was to him what, in our day, an aide-de-camp is to a
marshal. A few years later, Cardinal de Richelieu had his body-guard.
Several princes allied to the royal house--Guise, Conde, Nevers, and
Vendome, etc.--had pages chosen among the sons of the best families,--a
last lingering custom of departed chivalry. The wealth of the Duc
d’Herouville, and the antiquity of his Norman race indicated by his name
(“herus villoe”), permitted him to imitate the magnificence of families
who were in other respects his inferiors,--those, for instance, of
Epernon, Luynes, Balagny, d’O, Zamet, regarded as parvenus, but living,
nevertheless, as princes. It was therefore an imposing spectacle for
poor Etienne to see the assemblage of retainers of all kinds attached to
the service of his father.
The duke seated himself on a chair of state placed under a “solium,”
or dais of carved word, above a platform raised by several steps,
from which, in certain provinces, the great seigneurs still delivered
judgment on their vassals,--a vestige of feudality which disappeared
under the reign of Richelieu. These thrones, like the warden’s benches
of the churches, have now become objects of collection as curiosities.
When Etienne was placed beside his father on that raised platform, he
shuddered at feeling himself the centre to which all eyes turned.
“Do not tremble,” said the duke, bending his bald head to his son’s ear;
“these people are only our servants.”
Through the dusky light produced by the setting sun, the rays of which
were reddening the leaded panes of the windows, Etienne saw the
bailiff, the captain and lieutenant of the guard, with certain of their
men-at-arms, the chaplain, the secretaries, the doctor, the majordomo,
the ushers, the steward, the huntsmen, the game-keeper, the grooms,
and the valets. Though all these people stood in respectful attitudes,
induced by the terror the old man inspired in even the most important
persons under his command, a low murmur, caused by curiosity and
expectation, made itself heard. That sound oppressed the bosom of the
young man, who felt for the first time in his life the influence of
the heavy atmosphere produced by the breath of many persons in a closed
hall. His senses, accustomed to the pure and wholesome air from the sea,
were shocked with a rapidity that proved the super-sensitiveness of
his organs. A horrible palpitation, due no doubt to some defect in the
organization of his heart, shook him with reiterated blows when his
father, showing himself to the assemblage like some majestic old lion,
pronounced in a solemn voice the following brief address:--
“My friends, this is my son Etienne, my first-born son, my heir
presumptive, the Duc de Nivron, to whom the king will no doubt grant
the honors of his deceased brother. I present him to you that you may
acknowledge him and obey him as myself. I warn you that if you, or any
one in this province, over which I am governor, does aught to displease
the young duke, or thwart him in any way whatsoever, it would be better,
should it come to my knowledge, that that man had never been born. You
hear me. Return now to your duties, and God guide you. The obsequies
of my son Maximilien will take place here when his body arrives. The
household will go into mourning eight days hence. Later, we shall
celebrate the accession of my son Etienne here present.”
“Vive monseigneur! Long live the race of Herouville!” cried the people
in a roar that shook the castle.
The valets brought in torches to illuminate the hall. That hurrah, the
sudden lights, the sensations caused by his father’s speech, joined
to those he was already feeling, overcame the young man, who fainted
completely and fell into a chair, leaving his slender womanly hand
in the broad palm of his father. As the duke, who had signed to
the lieutenant of his company to come nearer, saying to him, “I am
fortunate, Baron d’Artagnon, in being able to repair my loss; behold my
son!” he felt an icy hand in his. Turning round, he looked at the new
Duc de Nivron, and, thinking him dead, he uttered a cry of horror which
appalled the assemblage.
Beauvouloir rushed to the platform, took the young man in his arms,
and carried him away, saying to his master, “You have killed him by not
preparing him for this ceremony.”
“He can never have a child if he is like that!” cried the duke,
following Beauvouloir into the seignorial chamber, where the doctor laid
the young heir upon the bed.
“Well, what think you?” asked the duke presently.
“It is not serious,” replied the old physician, showing Etienne, who was
now revived by a cordial, a few drops of which he had given him on a
bit of sugar, a new and precious substance which the apothecaries were
selling for its weight in gold.
“Take this, old rascal!” said the duke, offering his purse to
Beauvouloir, “and treat him like the son of a king! If he dies by your
fault, I’ll burn you myself on a gridiron.”
“If you continue to be so violent, the Duc de Nivron will die by your
own act,” said the doctor, roughly. “Leave him now; he will go to
sleep.”
“Good-night, my love,” said the old man, kissing his son upon the
forehead.
“Good-night, father,” replied the youth, whose voice made the
father--thus named by Etienne for the first time--quiver.
The duke took Beauvouloir by the arm and led him to the next room,
where, having pushed him into the recess of a window, he said:--
“Ah ca! old rascal, now we will understand each other.”
That term, a favorite sign of graciousness with the duke, made the
doctor, no longer a mere bonesetter, smile.
“You know,” said the duke, continuing, “that I wish you no harm. You
have twice delivered my poor Jeanne, you cured my son Maximilien of an
illness, in short, you are a part of my household. Poor Maximilien! I
will avenge him; I take upon myself to kill the man who killed him. The
whole future of the house of Herouville is now in your hands. You alone
can know if there is in that poor abortion the stuff that can breed a
Herouville. You hear me. What think you?”
“His life on the seashore has been so chaste and so pure that nature is
sounder in him than it would have been had he lived in your world. But
so delicate a body is the very humble servant of the soul. Monseigneur
Etienne must himself choose his wife; all things in him must be the
work of nature and not of your will. He will love artlessly, and will
accomplish by his heart’s desire that which you wish him to do for the
sake of your name. But if you give your son a proud, ungainly woman
of the world, a great lady, he will flee to his rocks. More than that;
though sudden terror would surely kill him, I believe that any sudden
emotion would be equally fatal. My advice therefore is to leave Etienne
to choose for himself, at his own pleasure, the path of love. Listen to
me, monseigneur; you are a great and powerful prince, but you understand
nothing of such matters. Give me your entire confidence, your unlimited
confidence, and you shall have a grandson.”
“If I obtain a grandson by any sorcery whatever, I shall have you
ennobled. Yes, difficult as it may be, I’ll make an old rascal into a
man of honor; you shall be Baron de Forcalier. Employ your magic, white
or black, appeal to your witches’ sabbath or the novenas of the Church;
what care I how ‘tis done, provided my line male continues?”
“I know,” said Beauvouloir, “a whole chapter of sorcerers capable of
destroying your hopes; they are none other than _yourself_, monseigneur.
I know you. To-day you want male lineage at any price; to-morrow you
will seek to have it on your own conditions; you will torment your son.”
“God preserve me from it!”
“Well, then, go away from here; go to court, where the death of the
marechal and the emancipation of the king must have turned everything
topsy turvy, and where you certainly have business, if only to obtain
the marshal’s baton which was promised to you. Leave Monseigneur Etienne
to me. But give me your word of honor as a gentleman to approve whatever
I may do for him.”
The duke struck his hand into that of his physician as a sign of
complete acceptance, and retired to his own apartments.
When the days of a high and mighty seigneur are numbered, the physician
becomes a personage of importance in the household. It is, therefore,
not surprising to see a former bonesetter so familiar with the Duc
d’Herouville. Apart from the illegitimate ties which connected him, by
marriage, to this great family and certainly militated in his favor, his
sound good sense had so often been proved by the duke that the old man
had now become his master’s most valued counsellor. Beauvouloir was the
Coyctier of this Louis XI. Nevertheless, and no matter how valuable his
knowledge might be, he never obtained over the government of Normandy,
in whom was the ferocity of religious warfare, as much influence
as feudality exercised over that rugged nature. For this reason the
physician was confident that the prejudices of the noble would thwart
the desires and the vows of the father.