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NEW BODIES FOR OLD
NEW BODIES
FOR OLD
BY
MAURICE RENARD
NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923
BY MAURICE RENARD
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATION
_To H. G. Wells_:
I beg you, Sir, to accept this book.
Of all the pleasures that its writing gave me, that of dedicating it to
you is assuredly not the least.
I conceived it under the inspiration of ideas that you cherish, and I
could have wished that it had come nearer to your own works than it
does, not in merit--that would be an absurd pretension--but, at any
rate, in that pleasant quality shown in all your books, which allows
the chastest minds, as well as those that exact the greatest realism,
to have communion with your genius--a communion which the ablest people
of our time can acknowledge without feeling its charm lessened by such
considerations.
But when Fortune for good or ill allowed me to discover the subject
of this allegorical novel, I felt bound not to set it aside because
of a few audacities which a faithful rendering involved and which an
arrest of development alone--that is, a crime against the literary
conscience--could avoid.
You now know--you could have guessed as much--what I should like people
to think of my work, if by chance any one did it the unexpected honor
of thinking about it at all. Far from desiring to arouse the creature
of instinct in my reader and amuse him with scandalous descriptions, my
work is addressed to the philosopher anxious for Truth amid the marvels
of Fiction and for Orderliness amid the tumult of imaginary Adventures.
That, Sir, is why I beg you to accept it.
M. R.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER
I NOCTURNE 16
II AMONG THE SPHINXES 38
III THE CONSERVATORY 65
IV HOT AND COLD 84
V “THE MADMAN” 101
VI NELL--THE ST. BERNARD 117
VII THUS SPAKE MLLE. BOURDICHET 136
VIII RASHNESS 154
IX THE AMBUSH 171
X THE CIRCEEAN OPERATION 192
XI IN THE PADDOCK 217
XII LERNE CHANGES HIS METHOD OF ATTACK 235
XIII EXPERIMENTS! HALLUCINATIONS! 253
XIV DEATH AND THE MASK 262
XV THE NEW BEAST 279
XVI THE WIZARD FINALLY DIES 300
NEW BODIES FOR OLD
NEW BODIES FOR OLD
INTRODUCTION
It all happened on a certain winter evening more than a year ago, after
the last men’s dinner-party I gave to my friends in the little house
which I had taken furnished in the Avenue Victor Hugo.
As my projected move was nothing more than the gratification of my
vagrant fancy, we had celebrated my house-_un_warming as joyfully as
we had celebrated the _warming_ of yore, and the time for liqueurs
having come (and also the time for jokes) each of us did his best
to shine--more especially of course, that naughty fellow Gilbert,
Marlotte, our paradoxical friend, the “Triboulet” of our band, and
Cardaillac, our licensed wizard.
I cannot remember now exactly how it came about, but after an hour
spent in the smoking-room, somebody switched off the electric light,
and urged us to have some table-turning; so we grouped ourselves in the
darkness round a little table. This “somebody” (please observe) was
not Cardaillac; but perhaps he was in league with Cardaillac--if indeed
Cardaillac _was_ the guilty party.
We were exactly eight men in all, eight skeptics _versus_ a little
insignificant table which had only one stem divided off at the end into
three legs, and whose round top bent under our sixteen hands placed on
it in accordance with occult rites!
It was Mariotte who instructed us in these rites. He had at one
time been an anxious inquirer about witchcraft, and familiar with
table-turning, though merely as an outsider, and as he was our
customary buffoon, when we saw him assume the direction of the
_séance_, every one just let himself go in anticipation of some
excellent clowning.
Cardaillac found himself my right-hand neighbor. I heard him stifle a
laugh in his throat and cough. Then the table began to turn.
Gilbert questioned it, and to his obvious stupefaction it replied by
dry cracklings like those made by creaking woodwork, and corresponding
to the esoteric alphabet.
Mariotte translated in a quavering voice.
Then everybody wanted to question the table; and in its replies it gave
proof of great sagacity. The audience became serious; one did not know
what to think. Queries leapt to our lips, and the replies were rapped
out from the foot of the table, near me--as I fancied--and towards my
right.
“Who will live in this house in a year’s time?” asked in his turn he
who had proposed the spiritualistic amusement.
“Oh, if you question it about the future,” said Mariotte, “you will
only get back thumping lies, or else it will hold its tongue.”
“Oh, shut up,” interposed Cardaillac. The question was repeated--“Who
will live in this house in a year’s time?”
“Nobody,” said the interpreter.
“And in two years’ time?”
“Nicolas Vermont.”
All of us heard this name for the first time.
“What will he be doing at this very hour on the anniversary of to-day?
Tell us what he is doing--speak.”
“He is beginning ... to write here ... his adventures.”
“Can you read what he writes?”
“Yes ... and also what he _will_ write.”
“Tell us the beginning, just the beginning.”
“Am tired--alphabet too tedious--Give typewriter ... will inspire
typist.”
A murmur went round in the darkness. I rose and went to fetch my
typewriter, and it was placed upon the table.
“It’s a ‘Watson,’” said the table. “I won’t have it. Am a French
table. Want a French machine ... want a ‘Durand.’”
“‘A Durand?’” said my neighbor on the left, in a disillusioned tone.
“Does that brand exist? I don’t know it.”
“Nor I.”
“Nor I.”
“Nor I.”
We were much vexed at this untoward circumstance, when the voice of
Cardaillac said slowly:
“I use nothing but a ‘Durand,’ would you like me to fetch it?”
“Can you type without seeing?”
“I shall be back in a quarter of an hour,” said he--and he went out
without answering.
“Oh, if Cardaillac is going to take it up,” said one of the guests, “we
shall have a merry time.”
However, when the lights were turned up, the faces seemed sterner than
one would have expected. Mariotte was quite pale.
Cardaillac came back in a very short time--an astonishingly short time,
one might have said. He sat down in front of the table facing his
“Durand” machine, and darkness was once more established. Suddenly the
table declared: “No need of others.... Put your feet on mine ... type.”
One heard the tapping of the fingers on the keys.
“It’s extraordinary!” exclaimed the typist-medium, “It’s
extraordinary! My hands are writing of their own accord.”
“What bosh!” whispered Mariotte.
“I swear they are, I swear it,” said Cardaillac.
* * * * *
We remained a long time listening to the tapping of the keys which was
every now and then broken by the ringing of the bell at the end of the
line and the rasping of the carriage. Every five minutes a sheet was
handed to us. We decided to retire to the drawing-room and to read them
aloud as Gilbert, getting them from Cardaillac, handed them to us.
Page 79 was deciphered in the morning light and the machine stopped.
But what it had typed seemed to us exciting enough to make us beg
Cardaillac to be good enough to give us the sequel.
He did so. And when he had passed many nights seated at the little
table with his typing keyboard, we had the complete story of M.
Vermont’s adventures.
The reader shall now be told them.
They are strange and scandalous; their future scribe is _bound_ not
to think of printing them. _He will burn them_ as soon as they are
finished; so that, had it not been for the complaisance of the little
table, no one would ever have turned the leaves. That is why I,
convinced of their authenticity, consider it _piquant_ to publish them
beforehand.
For I hold them to be “veridical,”--as the elect call it--although
they have some of the characteristics of wild caricature, and rather
resemble an art-student’s funny sketch penciled by way of commentary on
the margin of an engraving representing Science herself.
Are they possibly apocryphal? Well, fables are reputed to be more
seductive than History, and Cardaillac’s will not seem inferior to many
another one.
My hope, however, is that “Dr. Lerne” is the truthful account of
real happenings, for in that case, since the little table uttered
a prophecy, the tribulations of the hero have not yet begun, and
they will be running their course at the very time that this book is
divulging them--a very interesting circumstance indeed.
At any rate I shall certainly know in two years’ time if M. Nicolas
Vermont lives in the little house in the Avenue Victor Hugo. Something
assures me of it in advance--for how can one accept the idea of
Cardaillac--a serious-minded and intelligent fellow--squandering so
many hours in composing such a fable? That is my principal argument in
favor of its truthfulness.
However, if any conscientious reader desires to find reasons for the
faith that is in him, let him betake himself to Grey-l’Abbaye. There
he will be informed about the existence of Professor Lerne and his
habits. For my part I have not got the leisure for that, but I entreat
any one who may undertake the search to let me know the truth, being
myself very desirous of getting to the bottom of the question whether
the following tale is a mystification of Cardaillac’s, or was really
typed out by a clairvoyant table.
CHAPTER I
NOCTURNE
The first Sunday in June was drawing to a close. The shadow of the
motor-car was fleeting on ahead of me and getting longer every moment.
Ever since the morning, people had been looking at me with anxious
faces as I passed, just as one looks at a scene in a melodrama. With my
leather helmet which gave me the look of a bald skull, my glasses like
port-holes, or the eye-sockets of a skeleton, and my body clothed in
tanned skin, I must have seemed to them some queer seal from the nether
regions, or one of St. Anthony’s demons, fleeing from the sunlight
towards the night, in order to enter therein.
And to tell the truth, I had almost a soul like that of one of the
Lost; for such is the soul of a solitary traveler who has been for
seven hours at a stretch on a racing-car. His spirit has something
like a nightmare in it; in place of thought, an obsession is settled
there. Mine was a little peremptory phrase--“_Come alone, and give
notice_”--which, like a tenacious goblin, worried my lonely mind,
overstrained as it was with joltings and speed.
And yet this strange injunction “_come alone and give notice_,” doubly
underlined by my Uncle Lerne in his letter, had not at first struck
me excessively. But now that I was obeying it--being alone and having
given notice--and rolling along towards the Castle of Fonval, the
inexplicable command insisted, so to speak, on displaying all its
strangeness. My eyes began to see the fateful expression everywhere,
and my ears made it sound in every noise in spite of my efforts to
drive away the fixed idea. If I wanted to know the name of a village,
the sign-post announced “Come alone”; “Give notice” followed in the
wake of a bird’s flight, and the engine, unresting and exasperating,
repeated thousands and thousands of times: “Come alone, come alone,
come alone, give notice, give notice, give notice.” Then I began to ask
myself the wherefore of this wish of my uncle, and not being able to
find the reason, I ardently longed for the arrival which should solve
the mystery, less curious in reality about the doubtless commonplace
answer, than exasperated by so despotic a question.
Fortunately I was drawing near, and the country growing more and more
familiar spoke so clearly of the old days, that the haunting question
relaxed its insistence. The town of Nanthel, populous and busy,
detained me, but on coming out of the suburbs I at last perceived, like
a vague and very distant cloud, the heights of the Ardennes Mountains.
Evening draws on. Desiring to reach the goal before night I open out to
the full. The car hums, and under it the road is engulfed in a whirl;
it seems to enter the car to be rolled up in it, as the yards of ribbon
roll themselves up on a reel. Speed makes its hurricane wind whistle in
my ears; a swarm of mosquitoes riddle my face like small shot, and all
sorts of little creatures patter on my goggles.
Now the sun is on my right; it is on the horizon; the acclivities
and declivities of the road, raising me up and sinking me down very
quickly, make the sun rise and set for me several times in succession.
It disappears. I dash through the dusk as hard as my brave engine can
go--and I fancy that the 234 XY has never been excelled. This makes
the Ardennes about half an hour away. The cloudy offing is already
putting on a green tinge, a forest color, and my heart has leapt within
me. Fifteen years! I have not seen those dear great woods for fifteen
years--they were my old holiday friends.
For it is there, it is in their shadow that the _château_ hides in
the depths of an enormous hollow.... I remember that hollow very
distinctly and I can already distinguish its whereabouts--a dark stain
indicates it. Indeed it is the most extraordinary ravine. My late aunt,
Lidivine Lerne, who was fond of legends, would have it that Satan,
furious at some disappointment, had scooped it out with a single blow
of his gigantic hoof. This origin is disputed. In any case the metaphor
gives a vivid picture of the place, an amphitheater with precipitous
walls of rock, with no other outlet than a large defile opening on the
fields. The plain in other words penetrates into the mountain like
a gulf of the sea; it there forms a blind-alley, the perpendicular
walls of which rise as it spreads, and whose end is rounded off in a
wide sweep. The result is that one gets to Fonval without the least
climb, although it is right in the bosom of the mountain. The park is
the inner part of the circle, and the cliff serves as a natural wall,
except in the direction of the defile. This latter is separated from
the domain by a wall into which a gateway has been let. A long avenue
leads up to it, straight, and lined with lime trees. In a few minutes I
shall be in it ... and soon after I shall know why nobody must follow
me to Fonval--“come alone and give notice”--why these orders?
Patience. The mass of the Ardennes cleaves itself into clumps. At the
rate I am going, each clump seems in motion; gliding rapidly; the
crests pass one behind the other, draw near or draw off, seem lower
and then rise again with the majesty of waves, and the spectacle is
incessantly varying like that of a titanic sea.
A turn in the road unmasks a hamlet, I know it well. In the old days,
every year, in the month of August, it was before that station that my
uncle’s carriage, with Biribi in the shafts, awaited my mother and me.
We used to go there for the holidays. All hail Grey-l’Abbaye! Fonval is
only three kilometers distant now. I could go there blindfold. Here is
the road leading straight to the place, the road which will soon plunge
into the woods and take the name of Avenue.
It is almost night. A peasant shouts something at me--insults probably.
I’m accustomed to that. My hooter replies with its threatening and
mournful cry.
The forest! Ah, what a potent perfume it has for me--the perfume of the
old-time holidays! Can their memory bring any other odor than that of
the forest? It is an exquisite odor.... I should like to prolong this
festival of scent.
Slowing down, the car goes on gently. Its sound becomes a murmur. Right
and left the cliff walls of the wide gully begin to rise. Were there
more light, I should be coming into sight of Fonval at the end of the
straight line of the avenue. Hullo! What’s up?...
I had almost upset; the road had unexpectedly made a bend.
I slackened off still more. A little further on another bend--then
another....
I stopped.
The stars one by one were beginning to shed their luminous dew.
In the light of the Spring evening I could see above me the high
mountain-crests, and the direction of their slopes astonished me. I
tried to back, and discovered a bifurcation which I had not noted in
passing. When I had taken the road to the right, it offered me after
several windings a new branching-off--like a riddle; and then I guided
myself in the Fonval direction according to the lie of the cliffs that
ran towards the _château_, but new cross-roads embarrassed me. What had
become of the straight avenue?... The thing utterly puzzled me.
I switched on the head-lights. For a long time by the aid of their
light I wandered among the criss-crossing of the alleys without being
able to find my way, so many various offshoots joined the open places,
and so balking were the blind-alleys. It seemed to me I had already
passed a certain birch-tree. Moreover the cliff walls always remained
at the same height; so that I was really turning in a maze and making
no advance. Had the peasant of Grey tried to warn me? It seemed
probable.
None the less, trusting to chance, and piqued by the _contretemps_, I
went on with my exploration. Three times the same crossing showed in
the field of light of my lamps, and three times I came on that same
birch-tree by different roads.
I wanted to call for help. Unfortunately the hooter went wrong, and I
had no horn. As for my voice, the distance which separated me from Grey
on the one side and Fonval on the other would have prevented its being
heard.
Then a fear assailed me ... if my petrol gave out!... I halted in the
middle of a cross-road and tested the level. My tank was almost empty.
What would be the good in exhausting it in vain evolutions! After all,
it seemed to me an easy thing to reach the _château_ on foot through
the woods.... I tried it. But wire-fences hidden in the bushes blocked
the way.
Assuredly this labyrinth was not a practical joke played at the
entrance of a garden, but a defensive contrivance to protect the
approaches of some retreat.
Much out of countenance, I began to reflect.
“Uncle Lerne, I don’t understand you at all,” thought I. “You received
the notice of my arrival this morning, and here am I detained in the
most abominable of landscape-gardens.... What fantastic idea made you
contrive it? Have you changed more than I thought? You would hardly
have dreamt of such fortifications fifteen years ago.”
... “Fifteen years ago, the night, no doubt, resembled this one. The
heavens were alive with the same glitter, and already the toads were
enlivening the silence with their clear short cries, so pure and sweet.
A nightingale was warbling its trills as that one now is doing. Uncle,
that evening of long ago was delicious too. And yet my aunt and my
mother had just died, within eight days of one another, and the sisters
having disappeared, we remained face to face, one a widower, and the
other an orphan--you, uncle, and I.”
And the man of those far-off days stood before my mind’s eye as the
town of Nanthel knew him then, the surgeon already celebrated at
thirty-five for the skill of his hand and the success of his bold
methods, and who in spite of his fame, remained faithful to his native
town--Dr. Frédéric Lerne, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the “Ecole
de Médecine,” corresponding member of numerous learned societies,
decorated with many divers orders, and--to omit nothing--guardian of
his nephew, Nicolas Vermont.
This new father whom the Law assigned me I had not met often, for he
took no holidays and only passed his summer Sundays at Fonval. And
even these he spent in work--ceaseless and secret work. On those days
his passion for horticulture, suppressed all the week, kept him shut up
in the little hothouse with his tulips and his orchids.
And yet, in spite of the rarity of our meetings, I knew him well and
loved him dearly.
He was a sturdy man, calm and sober, rather cold perhaps, but so kind.
In my irreverent way I called his shaven face an “old wife’s face,” and
my jesting was quite misplaced, for sometimes he would turn it into an
antique visage, lofty and grave, and sometimes into one of delicate
mockery (“Regency” style). Among our modern shavelings my uncle was of
the few whose head and face by their nobility prove their legitimate
descent from an ancestor draped in a _toga_, and a grandfather clothed
in satin, and would allow their scion to wear the costumes of his
ancestors without putting them to shame.
For the moment Lerne appeared to me decked out in a black overcoat
rather badly cut, in which I had seen him for the last time--when I was
setting out for Spain. Being a rich man, and wishing me to be one too,
my uncle had sent me into the cork business as an _employee_ of the
firm Gomez & Co. of Badajoz.
And my exile had lasted fifteen years, during which the position of the
Professor had certainly become better, to judge by the sensational
operations he had performed, the fame of which had reached me in the
depths of Estremadura.
As for me, my affairs had come to grief. At the end of fifteen years,
despairing of ever selling safety-belts and cork on my own account, I
had just returned to France to seek another trade, when Fate procured
me that of an independent man. It was I who won the lucky number for a
million francs, the donor of which wished to remain _incognito_.
In Paris I took comfortable rooms, but without luxury. My flat was
convenient and unpretentious. I had the bare necessaries _plus_ a
motor-car and _minus_ a family.
But before founding a new family, it seemed to me the right thing to
renew relations with the old--that is to say with Lerne, and I wrote to
him.
Not but what after our separation a regular correspondence had been
established between us. At the beginning he had given me wise advice
and had shown himself pleasantly paternal. His first letter indeed
contained the announcement of a Will in my favor hidden in the secret
drawer of a desk at Fonval.
After the rendering of his accounts as guardian our relations remained
as before. Then, suddenly, his messages became different in character,
and grew fewer and fewer, their tone becoming that of boredom,
then of annoyance. The matter was commonplace, then vulgar, and the
phrasing awkward; the very writing seemed to alter. Each time he wrote,
these things became more marked, and I had to limit myself every 1st
of January to sending my best wishes. My uncle replied with a few
scribbled words.... Wounded in the only affection I possessed, I was
much afflicted.
What had happened?
A year before this sudden change--five years before my return to Fonval
and my wanderings in the labyrinth--I had read in the “Epoca”:
“We have received the news from Paris that Professor Lerne is saying
good-by to his patients in order to devote himself to scientific
research begun in the hospital of Nanthel. With this aim that
excellent physician is retiring to the neighborhood of the town in
the Ardennes, to his _château_ of Fonval which has been arranged
for that purpose. He is taking with him among others, Dr. Klotz of
Mannheim and the three assistants of the _Anatomisches Institut_
founded by this latter at 22, Friedrichstrasse, which has now closed
its doors--when shall we have results?”
Lerne had confirmed this event to me in an enthusiastic letter, which,
however, added nothing to the bald facts in the paragraph. And it was
a year later on, I say again, that the change in his nature had taken
place. Had twelve months of work ended in failure? Had some bitter
disappointment so gravely affected the Professor that he should treat
me like a stranger and almost as if I were a bore?...
In defiance of his hostility I wrote respectfully and with the utmost
possible affection from Paris the letter in which I told him of my good
fortune, and I asked his leave to pay him a visit.
Never was invitation less engaging than his. He asked me to give him
warning of my arrival so that he might order a carriage to go and fetch
me from the station. “You will doubtless not remain long at Fonval,” he
added, “for Fonval is not a gay place. We are hard at work. _Come alone
and give notice._”
But, Heavens! I _had_ given notice and I _was_ alone!--I who had
considered my visit as a duty! Well, well, that was merely a piece of
stupidity on my part.
And I gazed in bad humor at the star of light on the roads where the
exhausted head-lamps were casting no brighter an illumination than a
night-light.
Without doubt I was going to pass the night in that sylvan jail;
nothing would get me out of it before day. The toads of the pool in the
Fonval direction called me in vain; vainly the steeple clock of Grey
rang out the hours to tell me of the other resting-place--for belfries
are really sonorous lighthouses--I was a prisoner.
A prisoner! It made me smile. Long ago how frightened I should
have been! A prisoner in the Ardennes! At the mercy of Brocéliande,
the monstrous forest which with its cavernous shade held a world in
darkness between its boundaries, one being at Blois and the other in
Constantinople! Brocéliande! that scene of epic tales and puerile
legends, country of the four sons of Aymon and of Hop-o’-my-Thumb, the
forest of druids and goblins, the wood in which Sleeping Beauty fell
into slumber while Charlemagne kept watch! What fantastic stories had
not its thickets for a stage--were not the trees themselves living
persons? “Oh, Aunt Lidivine,” I murmured, “how well you could give life
to all those nonsensical tales every evening after dinner! The dear
lady! Did she ever suspect the influence of her stories? Aunt, did
you know that all your astounding puppets invaded my life by passing
through my dreams? Do you know that a flourish of enchanted trumpets
still sounds in my ears sometimes; you who made my nights at Fonval
resound with the oliphant of Roland and the horn of Oberon?”
At that moment I could not check a movement of vexation; the head-lamps
had just gone out after an agonized throb. For a second the darkness
was total, and at the same time there was such a profound silence that
I could well believe I had suddenly become blind and deaf.
Then my eyes gradually became unsealed, and soon the crescent moon
appeared, shedding its snowy light on the cold night. The forest became
lit up with a frozen whiteness. I shivered. In my aunt’s lifetime it
would have been with terror; I should have beheld in the darkness,
where the vapors were creeping, dragons wallowing and serpents gliding.
An owl flew off. I should have considered that bird the winged helm of
a paladin--an enchanted paladin. The birch tree, standing straight up,
shone with a lance-like gleam. An oak tree--a son perhaps of the magic
tree which was the husband of the Princess Leélina--quivered. It was
huge and druidical--a bunch of mistletoe hung on its main branch, and
the moon cut through it with a shining sacred sickle.
Assuredly the nocturnal landscape was like an hallucination. For want
of something better to do, I meditated on it. Without understanding why
as well as I do to-day, I used to experience all its suggestiveness,
and at nightfall I only ventured out unwillingly. Fonval itself was,
I think, in spite of its countless flowers and its beautiful winding
alleys, a most forbidding place. Its pointed windows, its hundred
years old park inhabited by statues, the stagnant water of its pond,
the precipice which closed it in, the Hell-like entrance, all these
things made that ancient abbey (transformed into a _château_) peculiar
even in daylight, and one would not have been surprised to learn
that everybody there talked in fables. That would have been his real
language.
That at any rate was how I talked, and still more how I acted, during
my holidays. These were for me a long fairy tale in which I played
with imaginary or artificial personages, living in the water, in the
trees, and under the earth oftener than upon it. If I passed the lawn
galloping with my bare legs, my air clearly showed the squadrons
of knights were, in my fancy, charging behind me. And the old boat
I masted for the occasion with three broomsticks, on which bellied
nondescript sails, served me as a galleon, and the pond became the
Mediterranean bearing the fleet of the Crusaders. Lost in thought
and looking at the water-lily islands and the grass peninsulas, I
proclaimed: “Here are Corsica and Sardinia!... Italy is in sight....
We are sailing round Malta....” At the end of a minute I cried “Land!”
We were landing in Palestine--“Montjoye and St. Denis!”--I suffered
on that boat sea-sickness and home-sickness; the Holy War intoxicated
me;--I learnt in it two things--enthusiasm and geography....
But often the other characters were represented. That made it more
real. I remembered then--for every child has a Don Quixote in him--I
remembered a giant Briareus who was the summerhouse, and especially
a barrel which became the dragon of Andromeda. Oh, that barrel! I had
made a head for it with the help of a squinting pumpkin, and vampire
wings with two umbrellas. Having ambushed my contraption at the bend
of an alley, leaning it up against a terra-cotta nymph, I set out in
_search_ of it more valiant than the real Perseus, and, armed with
a pole, I went caracoling on an invisible hippogriff. But when I
_discovered_ it, the pumpkin leered at me so strangely that Perseus
almost took flight, and the umbrellas owed it to his emotion that they
were broken to pieces in the yellow blood of the facetious vegetable.
My puppets did indeed make an impression on me by reason of the rôle
I assigned them. As I always reserved for myself that of protagonist,
hero, conqueror, I easily surmounted that terror during the day, but at
night, though the hero became little Nicolas Vermont, an urchin, the
barrel remained a dragon. Cowering under the sheets, my mind excited
by the story which my aunt had just finished, I _knew_ the garden was
peopled with my terrifying fancies, and that Briareus was mounting
guard there all the time, and that the dreadful barrel, resuscitated,
hiding its claws with its wings, watched my window from afar.
At that age I despaired of ever being, later on in life, like other
people, and able to face the dark. And yet my fears did vanish,
leaving me impressionable no doubt, but not a coward; and it was indeed
I who found myself without dismay lost in the lonely wood--all too
empty, alas, of fairies and enchanters.
I had just reached this point in my _reverie_, when a sort of vague
noise arose in the Fonval direction; an ox’s lowing, and something like
a dog’s long mournful howl. That was all--and then the sleeping calm
returned.
Some minutes elapsed, and next I heard an owl hoot somewhere between
myself and the _château_; another raised its voice not so far away as
the first; and then others took flight from places nearer and nearer
me, as if the passage of some creature were scaring them.
And indeed a light sound of steps like the trot of some four-footed
animal, made itself heard and drew nearer on the roadway. I listened
for some time to the beast moving to and fro in the labyrinth, losing
itself like me perhaps, and then suddenly it appeared before me.
One could not mistake its spreading antlers, the height of its neck
and the delicacy of its ears; it was a stag of ten. But hardly had I
perceived it than it made off in a sudden _volte-face_. Then--had it
gathered itself in to spring?--its body seemed to me strangely low and
paltry, and was it a mere reflection?--seemed to me to be of a white
color. The animal disappeared in a twinkling, and its little galloping
steps died quickly away.
Had I at the first glance taken a goat for a stag? Or had I at the
second glance taken a stag for a goat? To tell the truth, I was much
interested and puzzled; so much so that I asked myself whether I were
not going to resume the soul of the child I had been at Fonval.
But a little reflection made me realize that hunger, fatigue and
sleepiness, helped out by moonshine, may easily cause one’s eyes to be
deceived, and that a ray falling on an object and transforming it is no
unwonted phenomenon.
I rather regretted it; for, having lost my terror of the mysterious,
I had still kept my love for it. I am one of those who are sorry that
“Philosophy has clipped an angel’s wings,” and yet I cannot let a
mystery remain a mystery for me.
Now this beast was really a very extraordinary beast.
Wandering as it was through the incomprehensible labyrinth of the wood,
it seemed to me an elusive riddle in a problem, and my curiosity was
aroused.
But utterly wearied as I was, I soon fell asleep pondering detective
ruses and subtle logical methods of investigation.
* * * * *
I awoke at dawn, and immediately I had a glimpse of a possible end to
my imprisonment.
Not far from where I was, some men, hidden by the underwood, were
walking and talking. Their steps came and went like those of the
stag(?) treading, doubtless the same winding ways. At one moment they
passed, still hidden, a few paces away from my car, but I could not
understand their conversation--it seemed to be in German.
At last they stood before me at the very place where the animal had
appeared. There were three of them, and they were bending down as if
they were following a trail. At the spot where the beast had turned,
one of them uttered an exclamation and made a gesture as if they should
go back. But they perceived me and I advanced towards them.
“Gentlemen,” said I smiling my best, “could you kindly show me the way
to Fonval? I have lost myself.”
The three men looked at me without replying, in an inquisitive and shy
way.
They were a very remarkable trio.
The first possessed on the top of a massive and squat body a round and
calamitously flat face, the thin pointed nose on which, as if it had
been shoved into it, made the disc into a sundial.
The second had a military air and was twisting his mustache, which was
on the German imperial model, and his chin stuck out like the toe of a
boot.
A tall old man with gold spectacles, gray curly hair and an unkempt
beard, made up the trio. He was eating cherries in a noisy way, as a
bumpkin eats tripe.
They were obvious Germans, doubtless the assistants from the
_Anatomisches Institut_.
The tall old man spat out in my direction a salvo of cherry-stones, and
in the direction of his comrades, one of those Teuton phrases, in which
a hail of shrapnel-like words mingles with other nameless noises.
They exchanged in their own way some remarks which resembled so many
broadsides, without paying the least attention to me, and then after
cleverly imitating with their mouths the sound of a battle going on
beside a waterfall--having held a council, in fact--they turned on
their heels and left me astounded at their rudeness.
But I had to get out of that fix somehow or other. My adventure became
hourly more ridiculous. What was the meaning of all this? What comedy
was I playing? Was I being made a fool of? I was furious. The would-be
secrets I had fancied I scented now seemed to me mere childishness
caused by weariness and the dark. The thing was to get away--to get
away at once.
Raging and without reflection I made the contact which set the car
going, and the 80 horse-power engine started to work in the bonnet with
the humming of a hive of bees. I seized the starting lever--and then a
great guffaw of laughter made me turn round.
With his cap over his ears, in blouse of blue, and with his letter-bag
on his shoulder, hilarious and triumphant, a postman came on the scene.
“Ha, ha! I told you last night that you would lose your way,” said he
in a drawling voice.
I recognized my villager of Grey-l’Abbaye, and bad temper prevented me
answering him.
“It’s to Fonval you want to go, is it?” he went on.
I cursed Fonval in some very profane language in which I consigned it
and its inhabitants to the Devil.
“Because,” went on the postman, “if you are going there, I’ll show you
the way. I am taking the letters there. But make haste, I have double
load to-day; for this is Monday and I don’t come on Sunday.”
While saying this, he had drawn his letters from his bag, and was
arranging them in his hand.
“Show me that,” I cried sharply, “Yes, that yellow envelope.”
He looked me up and down distrustfully and then let me look at it from
a distance.
It was _my_ letter--the announcement of my arrival, which followed it
by a night, instead of preceding it by a day!
This untoward circumstance absolved my uncle and drove away my rancour.
“Get in,” I said. “You shall show me the way and then ... we shall have
a talk!”
The car set off in the freshness of the morning.
A mist was just melting away, as if the sun after whitening the dark
had still to dissolve it, and as if this faint fog, now almost nothing,
were a portion of the darkness remaining in the form of vapor, an
evanescent remainder of the night within the day, the vanishing specter
of a vanished phantom.