CHAPTER XIX

THE STORY OF

ANDRÉ CORNÉLIS

I

When a child, I went to confession. How often have I wished that I were

still the lad who came at five o'clock into the chapel of our school,

the cold empty chapel, with its white-washed walls, its benches on which

our places were numbered, its harmonium, its Holy Family, its blue

ceiling dotted with stars. We were taken to this chapel in tens. When it

came to my turn to kneel in one of the two spaces on either side of the

central seat of the priest, my heart would beat violently, and a feeling

of oppression would come upon me, produced by the gloom and silence, and

the murmur of the confessor's voice as he questioned the boy on the

opposite side, to whom I was to succeed. These sensations, and the shame

inspired by sins which I was to confess, made me start with dread when

the sound of the sliding panel announced that the moment had come, and I

could distinguish the priest's profile, and note the keenness of his

glance. What a moment of pain to endure, and then what a sense of

relief! What a feeling of liberty, alleviation, pardon--nay, effacement

of wrong-doing; what conviction that a spotless page was now offered to

me, and it was mine to fill it with good deeds. I am too far removed now

from the faith of my early years to imagine that there was a phenomenon

in all this. Whence then came the sense of deliverance that renewed the

youth of my soul? It came from the fact that I had told my sins, that I

had thrown over the burden of conscience that oppresses us all.

Confession was the lancet-stroke that empties the abscess. Alas! I have

now no confessional at which to kneel, no prayer to murmur, no God in

whom to hope! Nevertheless, I must get rid of these intolerable

recollections. The tragedy of my life presses too heavily upon my

memory, and I have no friend to speak to, no echo to take up my plaint.

There are things which cannot be uttered, since they ought not to find a

hearer; and so I have resolved, in order to cheat my pain, to make my

confession here, to myself alone, on this white paper, as I might make

it to a priest. I will write down all the details of my terrible history

as each comes to my remembrance, and when this confession is finished, I

shall see whether I am to be rid of the anguish also. Ah! if it could

even be diminished! If it were but lessened, so that I might have my

share of youth and life! I have suffered so much, and yet I love life,

in spite of my sufferings. A full glass of the black drug, the laudanum

that I always keep at hand for nights when I cannot sleep, and the slow

torture of my remorse would cease at once. But I cannot, I will not. The

instinctive animal desire _to live on_ stirs me more strongly than all

the moral reasons which urge me to make an end. Live then, poor wretch,

since Nature bids you tremble at the thought of death. Nature? And

besides, I do not want to go down there--no, not yet--into that dark

world where it may be we should meet. No, no, not that terror, not that!

See now, I had promised myself that I would be self-possessed, and I am

already losing control over my thoughts; but I will resume it. The

following is my project:

On these sheets of paper I will draw a true picture of my destiny, for I

can catch only glimpses of it in the blurred mirror of my thoughts. And

when the pages are covered with my scrawl I will burn them. But the

thing will have taken form, and existed before my eyes, like a living

being. I shall have thrown a light upon the chaos of horrible

recollections which bewilder me. I shall know what my strength really

is. Here, in this room where I came to the final resolution, it is only

too easy for me to remember. To work, then! I pass my word to myself

that I will set down the whole.

II

Let me remember? I have the sense of having trodden a sorrowing way

during many years, but what was my first step in the blood-spotted

pathway of pain? Where ought I to take up the tale of the slow

martyrdom, whose last stage of torture I have reached to-day? I know

not, for my feelings are like those lagoon-worn shores on which one

cannot tell where sea begins or ends; vague places, sand and water,

whose uncertain outline is constantly changing and being formed anew;

regions without bounds. Nevertheless these places are drawn upon the

map, and we may depict our feelings also by reflection, and after the

manner of analysis. The reality is ever shifting about. How intangible

it is, always escaping our eager grasp! The enigma of enigmas is to know

the exact moment at which a wound gapes in the heart, one of those

wounds which in mine have never closed. In order to simplify everything,

and to keep myself from sinking into that torpor of reverie which steals

over me like the influence of opium, I will divide my task into events,

marking first the precise fact which was the primal and determining

cause of all the rest--the tragic and mysterious death of my father. Let

me endeavour to recall the emotion by which I was overwhelmed at that

time, without mixing with it anything of what I have since understood

and felt.

I was nine years old. It was in 1864, in the month of June, at the close

of a warm afternoon. I was at my studies in my room as usual, having

come in from the Lycée Bonaparte, and the outer shutters were closed.

We lived in the Rue Tronchet, in the seventh house on the left, coming

from the church. Three highly-polished steps led to the little room,

prettily furnished in blue, within whose walls I passed the last happy

days of my life. Everything comes back to me. I was seated at my table,

dressed in a black overall, and engaged in writing out the tenses of a

Latin verb. All of a sudden I heard a cry, followed by a clamour of

voices; then rapid steps trod the corridor outside my room.

Instinctively I rushed to the door and came against a servant, who was

pale, and had a roll of linen in his hand. I understood the use of this

afterwards. At the sight of me he exclaimed:

"Ah! M. André, what an awful misfortune!"

Then, regaining his presence of mind, he said:

"Go back into your room--go back at once!"

Before I could answer, he caught me up in his arms, placed me on the

upper step of my staircase, locked the door of the corridor, and walked

rapidly away.

"No, no," I cried, flinging myself against the door, "tell me all; I

will, I must know." No answer. I shook the lock, I struck the panel with

my clenched fists, I dashed my shoulder against the door. Then, sitting

upon the lowest step, I listened, in an agony of fear, to the coming and

going of people outside, who knew of "the awful misfortune," but what

was it they knew? Child as I was, I understood the terrible

signification which the servant's exclamation bore under the actual

circumstances. Two days previously, my father had gone out after

breakfast, according to custom, to the place of business which he had

occupied for over four years, in the Rue de la Victoire. He had been

thoughtful during breakfast, indeed for some months past he had lost his

accustomed cheerfulness. When he rose to go, my mother, myself, and one

of the frequenters of our house, M. Jacques Termonde, a fellow student

of my father's at the École de Droit, were at table. My father left his

seat before breakfast was over, having looked at the clock, and inquired

whether it was right.

"Are you in such a hurry, Cornélis?" asked Termonde.

"Yes," answered my father, "I have an appointment with a client who is

ill--a foreigner--I have to call on him at his hotel to procure

important papers. He is an odd sort of man, and I shall not be sorry to

see something of him at closer quarters. I have taken certain steps on

his behalf and I am almost tempted to regret them."

And, since then, no news! In the evening of that day, when dinner, which

had been put off for one quarter of an hour after another, was over, and

my father, always so methodical, so punctual, had not come in, mother

began to betray her uneasiness, and could not conceal from me that his

last words dwelt in her mind. It was a rare occurrence for him to speak

with misgiving of his undertakings! The night passed, then the next

morning and afternoon, and once more it was evening. My mother and I

were once more seated at the square table, where the cover laid for my

father in front of his empty chair, gave, as it were, form to our

nameless dread. My mother had written to M. Jacques Termonde, and he

came--after dinner. I was sent away immediately, but not without my

having had time to remark the extraordinary brightness of M. Termonde's

blue eyes, and usually shone coldly in his thin face. He had fair hair

and a light beard. So children take note of small details, which are

speedily effaced from their minds, but afterwards reappear, at the

contact of life, just as certain invisible marks come out upon paper

held to the fire. While begging to be allowed to remain I was

mechanically observing the hurried and agitated turning and returning

of a light cane--I had long coveted it--held behind his back in his

beautiful hands. If I had not admired the cane so much, and the fighting

Centaurs on its handle--a fine piece of work--this symptom of extreme

disturbance might have escaped me. But, how could M. Termonde fail to be

disturbed by the disappearance of his best friend? Nevertheless, his

voice, which made all his phrases melodious, was calm.

"To-morrow," he said, "I will have every inquiry made, if Cornélis has

not returned; but he will come back, and all will be explained. Depend

on it, he went away somewhere on business he told you of, and left a

letter for you to be sent by a commissionaire who has not delivered it."

"Ah!" said my mother, "you think that is possible?"

How often, in my dark hours, have I recalled this dialogue, and the room

in which it took place--a little salon, much liked by my mother, with

hangings and furniture of some foreign stuff striped in red and white,

black and yellow, that my father had brought from Morocco; and how

plainly have I seen my mother in my mind's eyes, with her black hair,

brown eyes, and quivering lips. She was as white as the summer gown she

wore that evening. M. Termonde was dressed with his usual correctness,

and I remember well his elegant figure. It makes me smile when people

talk of presentiments. I went off perfectly satisfied with what he had

said. I had a childish admiration for this man, and hitherto he had

represented nothing to me but treats and indulgence. I attended the two

classes at the Lycée with a relieved heart. But, while I was sitting

upon the lower step of my little staircase, all my uneasiness revived. I

hammered at the door again, I called as loudly as I could; but no one

answered me, until the good woman who had been my nurse came into my

room.

"My father!" I cried, "where is my father?"

"Poor child, poor child," said nurse, and took me in her arms.

She had been sent to tell me the truth, but her strength failed her. I

escaped from her, ran out into the corridor, and reached my father's

bedroom before any one could stop me. Ah! upon the bed lay a form

covered by a white sheet, upon the pillow a bloodless, motionless face,

with fixed, wide-open eyes, for the lids had not been closed; the chin

was supported by a bandage, a napkin was bound around the forehead; at

the bed's foot knelt a woman, still dressed in her white summer gown,

crushed, helpless with grief. These were my father and my mother. I

flung myself upon her, and she clasped me passionately, with the

piercing cry, "My Andre, my André!" In that cry there was much intense

grief, in that embrace there was such frenzied tenderness, her heart was

then so big, that it warms my own even now to think of it. The next

moment she rose and carried me out of the room, that I might see the

dreadful sight no more. She did this easily, her terrible excitement had

doubled her strength. "God punishes me!" she said over and over again.

She had always been given, by fits and starts, to mystical piety. Then

she covered my face, my neck, and my hair with kisses and tears. May all

that we suffered, the dead and I, be forgiven you, poor mother, for the

sincerity of those tears at that moment. In my darkest hours, and when

the phantom was there, beckoning to me, your grief pleaded with me more

strongly than his plaint. Because of the kisses of that moment I have

always been able to believe in you, for those kisses and tears were not

meant to conceal anything. Your whole heart revolted against the deed

that bereaved me of my father. I swear by the anguish which we shared in

that moment, that you had no part in the hideous plot. Ah, forgive me,

that I have felt the need even now of affirming this. If you only knew

how one sometimes hungers and thirsts for certainty--ay, even to the

point of agony.

III

When I asked my mother to tell me all about the awful event, she said

that my father had been seized with a fit in a hackney carriage, and

that as no papers were found upon him, he had not been recognised for

two days. Grownup people are too ready to think it is equally easy to

tell lies to all children. Now, I was a child who pondered long in my

thoughts over things that were said to me, and by means of putting a

number of small facts together, I came to the conviction that I did not

know the whole truth. If my father's death had occurred in the manner

stated to me, why should the man-servant have asked me, one day when he

took me out to walk, what had been said to me about it? And when I

answered him, why did he say no more, and, being a very talkative

person, why had he kept silence ever since? Why, too, did I feel the

same silence all around me, sitting on every lip, hidden in every look?

Why was the subject of conversation constantly changed whenever I drew

near? I guessed this by many trifling signs. Why was not a single

newspaper left lying about, whereas, during my father's lifetime, the

three journals to which we subscribed were always to be found on a table

in the salon? Above all, why did both the masters and my schoolfellows

look at me so curiously, when I went back to school early in October,

four months after our great misfortune? Alas! it was their curiosity

which revealed the full extent of the catastrophe to me. It was only a

fortnight after the reopening of the school, when I happened to be

playing one morning with two new boys; I remember their names, Rastonaix

and Servoin, now, and I can see the fat cheeks of Rastonaix and the

ferret face of Servoin. Although we were outdoor pupils, we were allowed

a quarter of an hour's recreation indoors, between the Latin and English

lessons. The two boys had engaged me on the previous days for a game of

ninepins, and when it was over, they came close to me, and looking at

each other to keep up their courage, they put to me the following

questions, point-blank:

"Is it true that the murderer of your father has been arrested?"

"And that he is to be guillotined?"

This occurred sixteen years ago, but I cannot now recall the beating of

my heart at those words without horror. I must have turned pale, for the

two boys, who had struck me this blow with the carelessness of their

age--of our age--stood there disconcerted. A blind fury seized upon me,

urging me to command them to be silent, and to hit them if they spoke

again; but at the same time I felt a wild impulse of curiosity--what if

this were the explanation of the silence by which I felt myself

surrounded?--and also a pang of fear, the fear of the unknown. The blood

rushed into my face, and I stammered out:

"I do not know."

The drum-tap, summoning us back to the schoolroom, separated us. What a

day I passed, bewildered by my trouble, turning the two terrible

sentences over and over again.

It would have been natural for me to question my mother; but the truth

is, I felt quite unable to repeat to her what my unconscious tormentors

had said. It was strange but true, that henceforth my mother, whom

nevertheless I loved with all my heart, exercised a paralysing influence

over me. She was so beautiful in her pallor, so beautiful and proud. No,

I should never have ventured to reveal to her that an irresistible doubt

of the story she had told me was implanted in my mind merely by the two

questions of my schoolfellows; but, as I could not keep silence entirely

and live, I resolved to have recourse to Julie, my former nurse. She was

a little woman, fifty years of age, an old maid too, with a flat

wrinkled face; but her eyes were full of kindness, and indeed so was her

whole face, although her lips were drawn in by the loss of her front

teeth, and this gave her a witch-like mouth. She had deeply mourned my

father in my company, for she had been in his service before his

marriage. Julie was retained specially on my account, and in addition to

her the household consisted of the cook, the man-servant, and the

chamber-maid. Julie put me to bed and tucked me in, heard me say my

prayers, and listened to my little troubles. "Oh! the wretches!" she

exclaimed, when I opened my heart to her and repeated the words that had

agitated me so terribly. "And yet it could not have been hidden from you

for ever." Then it was that she told me all the truth, there in my

little room, speaking very low and bending over me, while I lay sobbing

in my bed. She suffered in the telling of that truth as much as I in the

hearing of it, and the touch of her dry old hand, with fingers scarred

by the needle, fell softly on my curly head.

That ghastly story, which bore down my youth with the weight of an

impenetrable mystery, I have found written in the newspapers of the day,

but not more clearly than it was narrated by my dear old Julie. Here it

is, plainly set forth, as I have turned and re-turned it over and over

again in my thoughts, day after day, with the vain hope of penetrating

it.

My father, who was a distinguished advocate, had resigned his practice

in court some years previously, and set up as a financial agent, hoping

by that means to make a fortune more rapidly than by the law. His good

official connection, his scrupulous probity, his extensive knowledge of

the most important questions, and his great capacity for work, had

speedily secured him an exceptional position. He employed ten

secretaries, and the million and a half francs which my mother and I

inherited formed only the beginnings of the wealth to which he aspired,

partly for his own sake, much more for his son's, but, above all, for

his wife's--he was passionately attached to her. Notes and letters found

among his papers proved that at the time of his death he had been for a

month previously in correspondence with a certain person named, or

calling himself, William Henry Rochdale, who was commissioned by the

firm of Crawford, in San Francisco, to obtain a railway concession in

Cochin China, then recently conquered, from the French Government. It

was with Rochdale that my father had the appointment of which he spoke

before he left my mother, M. Termonde, and myself, after breakfast, on

the last fatal morning. The _Instruction_ had no difficulty in

establishing this fact. The appointed place of meeting was the Imperial

Hotel, a large building, with a long façade, in the Rue de Rivoli, not

far from the Ministère de la Marine. The entire block of houses was

destroyed by fire in the Commune; but during my childhood I frequently

begged Julie to take me to the spot, that I might gaze, with an aching

heart, upon the handsome courtyard adorned with green shrubs, the wide,

carpeted staircase, and the slab of black marble, encrusted with gold,

that marked the entrance to the place whither my father wended his way,

while my mother was talking with M. Termonde, and I was playing in the

room with them. My father had left us at a quarter-past twelve, and he

must have taken a quarter of an hour to walk to the Imperial Hotel, for

the concierge, having seen the corpse, recognised it, and remembered

that it was just about half-past twelve when my father inquired of him

what was the number of Mr. Rochdale's rooms. This gentleman had arrived

on the previous day, and had fixed, after some hesitation, upon an

apartment situated on the second floor, and composed of a salon and a

bedroom, with a small anteroom, which separated the apartment from the

landing outside. From that moment he had not gone out, and he dined the

same evening and breakfasted the next morning in his salon. The

concierge also remembered that Rochdale came down alone, at about two

o'clock on the second day; but he was too much accustomed to the

continual coming and going to notice whether the visitor who arrived at

half-past twelve had or had not gone away again. Rochdale handed the key

of his apartment to the concierge, with directions that anybody who

came, wanting to see him, should be asked to wait in his salon. After

this he walked away in a leisurely manner, with a business-like

portfolio under his arm, smoking a cigar, and he did not reappear.

The day passed on, and towards night two housemaids entered the

apartment of the foreign gentleman to prepare his bed. They passed

through the salon without observing anything unusual. The traveller's

luggage, composed of a large and much-used trunk and a quite new

dressing-bag, were there. His dressing-things were arranged on the top

of a cabinet. The next day, towards noon, the same housemaids entered

the apartment, and finding that the traveller had slept out, they merely

replaced the day-covering upon the bed, and paid no attention to the

salon. Precisely the same thing occurred in the evening; but on the

following day, one of the women having come into the apartment early,

and again finding everything intact, began to wonder what this meant.

She searched about, and speedily discovered a body, lying at full length

underneath the sofa, with the head wrapped in towels. She uttered a

scream which brought other servants to the spot, and the corpse of my

father was removed from the hiding-place in which the assassin had

concealed it. It was not difficult to reconstruct the scene of the

murder. A wound in the back of the neck indicated that the unfortunate

man had been shot from behind, while seated at the table examining

papers, by a person standing close beside him. The report had not been

heard, on account of the proximity of the weapon, and also because of

the constant noise in the street, and the position of the salon at the

back of the anteroom. Besides, the precautions taken by the murderer

rendered it reasonable to believe that he had carefully chosen a weapon

which would produce but little sound. The ball had penetrated the spinal

marrow and death had been instantaneous. The assassin had placed new

unmarked towels in readiness, and in these he wrapped up the head and

neck of his victim, so that there were no traces of blood. He had dried

his hands on a similar towel, after rinsing them with water taken from

the carafe; this water he had poured back into the same bottle, which

was found concealed behind the drapery of the mantelpiece. Was the

robbery real or pretended? My father's watch was gone, and neither his

letter-case nor any paper by which his identity could be proved was

found upon his body. An accidental indication led, however, to his

immediate recognition. Inside the pocket of his waistcoat was a little

band of tape, bearing the address of the tailor's establishment. Inquiry

was made there, in the afternoon the sad discovery ensued, and after the

necessary legal formalities, the body was brought home.

And the murderer? The only data on which the police could proceed were

soon exhausted. The trunk left by the mysterious stranger, whose name

was certainly not Rochdale, was opened. It was full of things bought

haphazard, like the trunk itself, from a bric-à-brac seller who was

found, but who gave a totally different description of the purchaser

from that which had been obtained from the concierge of the Imperial

Hotel. The latter declared that Rochdale was a dark, sunburnt man with a

long thick beard; the former described him as of fair complexion and

beardless. The cab on which the trunk had been placed immediately after

the purchase, was traced, and the deposition of the driver coincided

exactly with that of the bric-à-brac seller. The assassin had been

taken in the cab, first to a shop, where he bought a dressing-bag, next

to a linendraper's, where he bought the towels, thence to the Lyons

railway station, and there he had deposited the trunk and the

dressing-bag at the parcels office. Then the other cab which had taken

him, three weeks afterwards, to the Imperial Hotel, was traced, and the

description given by the second driver agreed with the deposition of the

concierge. From this it was concluded that in the interval formed by

these three weeks, the assassin had dyed his skin and his hair, for all

the depositions were in agreement with respect to the stature, figure,

bearing, and tone of voice of the individual. This hypothesis was

confirmed by one Jullien, a hairdresser, who came forward of his own

accord to make the following statement:

On a day in the preceding month, a man who answered to the description

of Rochdale given by the first driver and the bric-à-brac seller, being

fair-haired, pale, tall, and broad-shouldered, came to his shop to order

a wig and a beard; these were to be so well constructed that no one

could recognise him, and were intended, he said, to be worn at a fancy

ball. The unknown person was accordingly supplied with a black wig and a

black beard, and he provided himself with all the necessary ingredients

for disguising himself as a native of South America, purchasing kohl for

blackening his eyebrows, and a composition of Sienna earth for colouring

his complexion. He applied these so skilfully, that when he returned to

the hairdresser's shop, Jullien did not recognise him. The unusualness

of a fancy ball given in the middle of summer, and the perfection to

which his customer carried the art of disguise, astonished the

hairdresser so much that his attention was immediately attracted by the

newspaper articles upon "The Mystery of the Imperial Hotel," as the

affair was called. At my father's house two letters were found; both

bore the signature of Rochdale, and were dated from London, but without

envelopes, and were written in a reversed hand, pronounced by experts to

be disguised. He would have had to forward a certain document on receipt

of these letters; probably that document was in the letter-case which

the assassin carried off after his crime. The firm of Crawford had a

real existence at San Francisco, but had never formed the project of

making a railroad in Cochin China. The authorities were confronted by

one of those criminal problems which set imagination at defiance. It was

probably not for the purpose of theft that the assassin had resorted to

such numerous and clever devices; he would hardly have led a man of

business into so skilfully laid a trap merely to rob him of a few

thousand francs and a watch. Was the murder committed for revenge? A

search into the record of my father revealed nothing whatever that could

render such a theory tenable. Every suspicion, every supposition, was

routed by the indisputable and inexplicable fact that Rochdale was a

reality whose existence could not be contested, that he had been at the

Imperial Hotel from seven o'clock in the evening of one day until two

o'clock in the afternoon of the next, and that he had then vanished,

like a phantom, leaving one only trace behind--_one only_. This man had

come there, other men had spoken to him; the manner in which he had

passed the night and the morning before the crime was known. He had done

his deed of murder, and then--nothing. "All Paris" was full of this

affair, and when I made a collection, long afterwards, of newspapers

which referred to it, I found that for six whole weeks it occupied a

place in the chronicle of every day. At length the fatal heading, "The

Mystery of the Imperial Hotel," disappeared from the columns of the

newspapers, as the remembrance of that ghastly enigma faded from the

minds of their readers, and solicitude about it ceased to occupy the

police. The tide of life, rolling that poor waif amid its waters, had

swept on. Yes; but I, the son? How should I ever forget the old woman's

story that had filled my childhood with tragic horror? How should I ever

cease to see the pale face of the murdered man, with its fixed, open

eyes? How should I not say: "I will avenge thee, thou poor ghost?" Poor

ghost! When I read _Hamlet_ for the first time, with that passionate

avidity which comes from an analogy between the moral situation depicted

in a work of art and some crisis of our own life, I remember that I

regarded the Prince of Denmark with horror. Ah! if the ghost of my

father had come to relate the drama of his death to me, with his

unbreathing lips, would I have hesitated one instant? No! I protested to

myself; and then? I learned all, and yet I hesitated, like him, though

less than he, to dare the terrible deed. Silence! Let me return to

facts.

IV

I remember little of succeeding events. All was so trivial,

insignificant, between that first vision of horror and the vision of woe

which came to me two years later, that, with one exception, I hardly

recall the intervening time. In 1864 my father died; in 1866 my mother

married M. Jacques Termonde. The exceptional period of the interval was

the only one during which my mother bestowed constant attention upon me.

Before the fatal date my father was the only person who had cared for

me; at a later period there was no one at all to do so. Our apartment in

the Rue Tronchet became unbearable to us; there we could not escape from

the remembrance of the terrible event, and we removed to a small hotel

in the Boulevard de Latour-Maubourg. The house had belonged to a

painter, and stood in a small garden which seemed larger than it was

because other gardens adjoined it, and overshadowed its boundary wall

with greenery. The centre of the house was a kind of hall, in the

English style, which the former occupant had used as a studio; my mother

made this her ordinary sitting-room. Now, at this distance of time, I

can understand my mother's character, and recognise that there was

something unreal and slightly theatrical about her, which, although it

was very harmless, led her to exaggerate the outward expression of all

her feelings. While she occupied herself in studying the attitudes by

which her emotions were to be fittingly expressed, the sentiments

themselves were fading away. For instance, she chose to condemn herself

to voluntary exile and seclusion after her bereavement, receiving only a

very few friends, of whom M. Jacques Termonde was one; but she very soon

began to adorn herself and everything around her with the fine and

subtle tastefulness that was innate in her. My mother was a very lovely

woman; her beauty was of a refined and pensive order, her figure was

tall and slender, her dark hair was very luxuriant and of remarkable

length. No doubt it was to the Greek blood in her veins that she owed

the classical lines of her profile, her full-lidded soft eyes, and the

willowy grace of her form. Her maternal grandfather was a Greek

merchant, of the name of Votronto, who had come from the Levant to

Marseilles when the Ionian Islands were annexed to France. Many times in

after years I have recalled the strange contrast between her rare and

refined beauty and my father's stolid sturdy form, and my own, and

wondered whether the origin of many irreparable mistakes might not be

traced to that contrast. But I did not reason in those days; I was under

the spell of the fair being who called me "My son." I used to look at

her with idolatry when she was seated at her piano in that elegant

sanctum of hers, which she had hung with draped foreign stuffs, and

decorated with tall green plants and various curious things, after a

fashion entirely her own. For her sake, and in spite of my natural

awkwardness and untidiness, I strove to keep myself very clean and neat

in the more and more elaborate costumes which she made me wear, and also

more and more did the terrible image of the murdered man fade away from

that home, which, nevertheless, was provided and adorned by the fortune

which he had earned for us and bequeathed to us. All the ways of modern

life are so opposed to the tragic in events, so far removed from the

savage realities of passion and bloodshed, that when such things intrude

upon the decorous life of a family, they are put out of sight with all

speed, and soon come to be looked upon as a bad dream, impossible to

doubt, but difficult to realise.

Yes, our life had almost resumed its normal course when my mother's

second marriage was announced to me. This time I accurately remember not

only the period, but also the day and hour. I was spending my holidays

with my spinster aunt, my father's sister, who lived at Compiègne, in a

house situated at the far end of the town. She had three servants, one

of whom was my dear old Julie, who had left us because my mother could

not get on with her. My aunt Louise was a little woman of fifty, with

countrified looks and manners: she had hardly ever consented to stay two

whole days in Paris during my father's lifetime. Her almost invariable

attire was a black silk gown made at home, with just a line of white at

the neck and wrists, and she always wore a very long gold chain of

ancient date, which was passed under the bodice of her gown and came out

at the belt. To this chain her watch and a bunch of seals and charms

were attached. Her cap, plainly trimmed with ribbon, was black like her

dress, and the smooth bands of her hair, which was turning grey, framed

a thoughtful brow and eyes so kind that she was pleasant to behold,

although her nose was large and her mouth and chin were heavy. She had

brought up my father in this same little town of Compiègne, and had

given him, out of her fortune, all that she could spare from the simple

needs of her frugal life, when he wished to marry Mdlle. de Slane, in

order to induce my mother's family to listen to his suit. The contrast

between the portrait in my little album of my aunt and her face as I saw

it now, told plainly enough how much she had suffered during the past

two years. Her hair had become more white, the lines which run from the

nostrils to the corners of the mouth were deepened, her eyelids had a

withered look. And yet she had never been demonstrative in her grief. I

was an observant little boy, and the difference between my mother's

character and that of my aunt was precisely indicated to my mind by the

difference in their respective sorrow. At that time it was hard for me

to understand my aunt's reserve, while I could not suspect her of want

of feeling. Now it is to the other sort of nature that I am unjust. My

mother also had a tender heart, so tender that she did not feel able to

reveal her purpose to me, and it was my aunt Louise who undertook to do

so. She had not consented to be present at the marriage, and M.

Termonde, as I afterwards learned, preferred that I should not attend on

the occasion, in order, no doubt, to spare the feelings of her who was

to become his wife. In spite of all her self-control, Aunt Louise had

tears in her brown eyes when she led me to the far end of the garden,

where my father had played when he was a child like myself. The golden

tints of September had begun to touch the foliage of the trees. A vine

spread its tendrils over the arbour in which we seated ourselves, and

wasps were busy among the ripening grapes. My aunt took both my hands in

hers, and began:

"André, I have to tell you a great piece of news."

I looked at her apprehensively. The shock of the dreadful event in our

lives had left its mark upon my nervous system, and at the slightest

surprise my heart would beat until I nearly fainted. She saw my

agitation and said simply:

"Your mother is about to marry."

It was strange this sentence did not immediately produce the impression

which my look at her had led my aunt to expect. I had thought from the

tone of her voice, that she was going to tell me of my mother's illness

or death. My sensitive imagination readily conjured up such fears. I

asked calmly:

"Whom?"

"You do not guess?"

"M. Termonde?" I cried.

Even now I cannot define the reasons which sent this name to my lips so

suddenly, without a moment's thought. No doubt M. Termonde had been a

good deal at our house since my father's death; but had he not visited

us as often, if not more frequently, before my mother's widowhood? Had

he not managed every detail of our affairs for us with care and

fidelity, which even then I could recognise as very rare? Why should the

news of his marriage with my mother seem to me on the instant to be much

worse news than if she had married no matter whom? Exactly the opposite

effect ought to have been produced, surely? I had known this man for a

long time; he had been very kind to me formerly--they said he spoiled

me--and he was very kind to me still. My best toys were presents from

him, and my prettiest books; a wonderful wooden horse which moved by

clockwork, given to me when I was seven--how much my poor father was

amused when I told him this horse was "a double thoroughbred"--"Don

Quixote," with Doré's illustrations, this very year; in fact some new

gift constantly, and yet I was never easy and light-hearted in his

presence as I had formerly been. When had this restraint begun? I could

not have told that, but I thought he came too often between my mother

and me. I was jealous of him, I may as well confess it, with that

unconscious jealousy which children feel, and which made me lavish

kisses on my mother when he was by, in order to show him that she was my

mother, and nothing at all to him. Had he discovered my feelings? Had

they been his own also? However that might be, I now never failed to

discern antipathy similar to my own in his looks, notwithstanding his

flattering voice and his over-polite ways. To a child instinct is never

deceived about such impressions. This was quite enough to account for

the shiver that went over me when I uttered his name. But I saw my aunt

start at my cry.

"M. Termonde," said she; "yes, it is he; but why did you think of him

immediately?" Then, looking me full in the face searchingly, she said in

a low tone, as though she were ashamed of putting such a question to a

child: "What do you know?"

At these words, and without any other cause than the weakness of nerves

to which I had been subject ever since my father's death, I burst into

tears. The same thing happened to me sometimes when I was shut up in my

room alone, with the door bolted, suffering from a dread which I could

not conquer, like that of a coming danger. I would forecast the worst

accidents that could happen; for example, that my mother would be

murdered, like my father, and then myself, and I peered under all the

articles of furniture in the room. It had occurred to me, when out

walking with a servant, to imagine that the harmless man might be an

accomplice of the mysterious criminal, and have it in charge to take me

to him, or at all events to lose me in some unknown place. My too

highly-wrought imagination overmastered me. I fancied myself, however,

escaping from the deadly device, and in order to hide myself more

effectually, making for Compiègne. Should I have enough money? Then I

reflected that it might be possible to sell my watch to an old

watchmaker whom I used to see, when on my way to the Lycée. That was a

sad faculty of foresight which poisoned so many of the harmless hours of

my childhood! It was the same faculty that now made me break out into

choking sobs when my aunt asked me what I had in my mind against M.

Termonde. I related the worst of my grievances to her then, leaning my

head on her shoulder, and in this one all the others were summed up. It

dated from two months before. I had come back from school in a merry

mood, contrary to my habit. My teacher had dismissed me with praise of

my compositions and congratulations on my prizes. What good news this

was to take home, and how tenderly my mother would kiss me when she

heard it! I put away my books, washed my hands carefully, and flew to

the salon where my mother was. I entered the room without knocking at

the door, and in such haste that as I sprang towards her to throw myself

into her arms, she gave a little cry. She was standing beside the

mantelpiece, her face was very pale, and near her stood M. Termonde. He

seized me by the arm and held me back from her.

"Oh, how you frightened me!" said my mother.

"Is that the way to come into a salon?" said M. Termonde.

His voice had turned rough like his gesture. He had grasped my arm so

tightly that where his fingers had fastened on it I found black marks

that night when I undressed myself. But it was neither his insolent

words nor the pain of his grasp which made me stand there stupidly, with

a swelling heart. No, it was hearing my mother say to him:

"Don't scold André too much; he is so young. He will improve."

Then she drew me towards her, and rolled my curls round her fingers; but

in her words, in their tone, in her glance, in her faint smile, I

detected a singular timidity, almost a supplication, directed to the man

before her, who frowned as he pulled his moustache with his restless

fingers, as if in impatience of my presence. By what right did he, a

stranger, speak in the tone of a master in our house? Why had he laid

his hand on me ever so lightly? Yes, by what right? Was I his son or his

ward? Why did not my mother defend me against him? Even if I were in

fault it was towards her only. A fit of rage seized upon me; I burned

with longing to spring upon M. Termonde like a beast, to tear his face

and bite him. I darted a look of fury at him and at my mother, and left

the room without speaking. I was of a sullen temper, and I think this

defect was due to my excessive sensitiveness. All my feelings were

exaggerated, so that the least thing angered me, and it was misery to me

to recover myself. Even my father had found it very difficult to get the

better of those fits of wounded feeling, during which I strove against

my own relentings with a cold and concentrated anger which both relieved

and tortured me. I was well aware of this moral infirmity, and as I was

not a bad child in reality, I was ashamed of it. Therefore, my

humiliation was complete when, as I went out of the room, M. Termonde

said:

"Now for a week's sulk! His temper is really insufferable."

His remark had one advantage, for I made it a point of honour to give

the lie to it, and did not sulk; but the scene had hurt me too deeply

for me to forget it, and now my resentment was fully revived, and grew

stronger and stronger while I was telling the story to my aunt. Alas! my

almost unconscious second-sight, that of a too sensitive child, was not

in error. That puerile but painful scene symbolised the whole history of

my youth, my invincible antipathy to the man who was about to take my

father's place, and the blind partiality in his favour of her who ought

to have defended me from the first and always.

"He detests me!" I said through my tears; "what have I done to him?"

"Calm yourself," said the kind woman. "You are just like your poor

father, making the worst of all your little troubles. And now you must

try to be nice to him on account of your mother, and not to give way to

this violent feeling, which frightens me. Do not make an enemy of him,"

she added.

It was quite natural that she should speak to me in this way, and yet

her earnestness appeared strange to me from that moment out. I do not

know why she also seemed surprised at my answer to her question. "What

do you know?" She wanted to quiet me, and she increased the

apprehension with which I regarded the usurper--so I called him ever

afterwards--by the slight faltering of her voice when she spoke of him.

"You will have to write to them this evening," said she at length.

Write to them! The words sickened me. They were united; never, nevermore

should I be able to think of the one without thinking of the other.

"And you?"

"I have already written."

"When are they to be married?"

"They were married yesterday," she answered, in so low a tone that I

hardly heard the words.

"And where?" I asked, after a pause.

"In the country, at the house of some friends." Then she added quickly:

"They preferred that you should not be there on account of the

interruption of your holidays. They have gone away for three weeks; then

they will go to see you in Paris before they start for Italy. You know I

am not well enough to travel. I will keep you here until then. Be a good

boy, and go now and write."

I had many other questions to put to her, and many more tears to weep,

but I restrained myself, and a quarter of an hour later, I was seated at

my dear good aunt's writing-table in her salon.

How I loved that room on the ground floor, with its glass door opening

on the garden. It was filled with remembrance for me. On the wall at the

side of the old-fashioned "secretary" hung the portraits, in frames of

all shapes and sizes, of those whom the good and pious soul had loved

and lost. This funereal little corner spoke strongly to my fancy. One of

the portraits was a coloured miniature, representing my

great-grandmother in the costume of the Directory, with a short waist,

and her hair dressed _à la_ Proudhon. There was also a miniature of my

great-uncle, her son. What an amiable, self-important visage was that of

the staunch admirer of Louis Philippe and M. Thiers! Then came my

paternal grandfather, with his strong parvenu physiognomy, and my father

at all ages. Underneath these works of art was a bookcase, in which I

found all my father's school prizes, piously preserved. What a feeling

of protection I derived from the portières in green velvet, with long

bands of needlework, my aunt's masterpieces, which hung in wide folds

over the doors! With what admiration I regarded the faded carpet, with

its impossible flowers, which I had so often tried to gather in my

babyhood! This was one of the legends of my earliest years, one of those

anecdotes which are told of a beloved son, which make him feel that the

smallest details of his existence have been observed, understood, and

loved. In later days I have been frozen by the ice of indifference. And

my aunt, she whose life had been lived among these old-fashioned things,

how I loved her, with that face in which I read nothing but supreme

tenderness for me, those eyes whose gaze did me good in some mysterious

part of my soul! I felt her so near to me, only through her likeness to

my father, that I rose from my task four or five times to kiss her,

during the time it took me to write my letter of congratulation to the

worst enemy I had, to my knowledge, in the world.

And this was the second indelible date in my life.

V

Indelible! Yes, those two dates and only those have remained so, and

when I retrace the past in fancy, I am always stopped by them. The two

images--my father assassinated, my mother married again--weighed long

upon my heart. Other children have restless and supple minds which yield

easily to successive impressions; they surrender themselves entirely to

the actual moment, pass from a pleasure to a childish trouble, and

forget in the evening what they have felt during the day. But I? ah, no!

From my two recollections I was never released. An ever present

hallucination kept before my mind's eye the dead face on the pillow, and

my mother kneeling at the bed's foot, or the sound in my ears of my

aunt's voice announcing the other news. I could always see her sad face,

her brown eyes, and the black bows on her cap shaking in the wind of the

September afternoon. And still, even to-day, when I am endeavouring to

reproduce the history of my mind's life, or the real and solitary André

Cornélis, all other remembrances vanish before those two; not a phase

of my youth but is pervaded by them and contained in them, as the cloud

contains the lightning, and the fire it kindles, and the ruins of the

homesteads which it strikes. Of all the images that crowd upon my

memory, recalling what I was during my long years of childhood and

youth, those two disastrous days are always the chief; they form the

background of the picture of my life, the dark horizon of a more

melancholy landscape.

What are the other images? A large space, with old trees in it, some

children playing late on an autumn day; while others, who are not

playing, but only look on, lean against the old brown tree-stems, or

wander about like forsaken creatures. This is the playground of the

Lycée at Versailles. The scholars who are playing are the "old" boys,

the others, the shy exiles, are the "new," and I am one of the latter.

It is just four short weeks since my aunt told me of my mother's

marriage, and already my life is entirely changed. On my return from the

holidays it was decided that I should enter the school as a boarder. My

mother and my stepfather were about to travel in Italy until the summer,

and the question of their taking me with them was not even mooted. My

mother proposed to allow me to remain as a day-pupil, under the care of

my aunt, who would come up to Paris; but my stepfather negatived the

proposition at once by quite reasonable arguments. Why should so great a

sacrifice of all her habits be imposed upon the old lady, and what was

there to dread in the rough life of a boarding-school, which is the best

means of forming a boy's character?

"And he needs that schooling," added my stepfather, directing the same

cold glance towards me as on the day when he grasped my arm so roughly.

In short, it was settled that I was to go to school, but not in Paris.

"The air is bad," said my stepfather.

Why am I not in the least obliged to him for his seeming solicitude for

my health? It was not because I foresaw what he had foreseen

already--he, the man who wanted to separate me from my mother for

ever--that it would be easier for them to leave me at a school outside

the city than at one nearer home, when they returned? What need has he

of these calculations? Is it not enough that he should give utterance to

a wish for Madame Termonde to obey him? How I suffer when I hear her say

"thou" to him, just as she used to say it to my own father. And then I

think of the days when I came home from my classes at the Lycée

Bonaparte, and that dear father helped me with my lessons. My stepfather

brought me to this school yesterday in the afternoon, and it was he who

presented me to the head master, a tall thin personage with a bald head,

who tapped me on the cheek and said:

"Ah, he comes from Bonaparte, the school of the 'Muscadins.'"

That same evening I had the curiosity to refer to the dictionary for

this word "Muscadin," and I found the following definition: "A young man

who studies personal adornment." It is true that I do not resemble the

fellows in tunics among whom I am to live, for I am handsomely dressed,

according to my mother's taste, and my costume includes a large white

collar and smart English boots. The other boys have shapeless képis,

coarse blue stockings which fall over their broken shoes, and their

buttons are mostly torn off. They wear out the last year's outdoor

costume in the house. During the first play-time on my first day,

several of the boys eyed me curiously, and one of them asked me: "What

does your father do?" I made no answer. What I dread, with unbearable

misery, is that they may speak to me of it. Yesterday, while my

stepfather and I were coming down to Versailles in the railway carriage,

without exchanging a word, what would I have given to be able to tell

him of this dread, to entreat him not to throw me among a number of

boys, and leave me to their heedless rudeness and cruelty, to promise

him that I would work harder and better than before, if I might but

remain at home! But the look in his blue eyes is so sharp when they rest

on me, it is so hard for me to say the word "Papa" to him--that word

which I am always saying in my thoughts to the other; to him who lies,

in the sleep that knows no waking, in the cemetery at Compiègne! And so

I addressed no supplication to M. Termonde, and I allowed myself to be

shut up in the Versailles Lycée without a word of protest. I preferred

to wander about as I do among strangers, to uttering one complaint to

him. Mamma is to come to-morrow; she is going away the next day, and the

nearness of this interview prevents me from feeling the inevitable

separation too keenly. If she will only come without my stepfather!

She came--and with him. She took her seat in the parlour, which is

decorated with vile portraits of scholars who have taken prizes at the

general examinations. My schoolfellows were also talking to their

mothers, but none could boast a mother so worthy to be loved as mine!

Never had she seemed to me so beautiful, with her slender and elegant

figure, her graceful neck, her deep eyes, her fine smile. But I could

not say a word to her, because my stepfather, "Jack," as she called him,

with her pretty affectation of an English accent, was there between us.

Ah! that antipathy which paralyses all the loving impulses of the heart,

how intensely have I felt it, then and since! I thought I could perceive

that my mother was surprised, almost saddened by my coldness when she

bade me farewell; but ought she not to have known that I would never

show my love for her in his presence? She is gone; she is on her

travels, and I remain here.

Other images arise which recall our schoolroom in the evenings of that

first winter of my imprisonment. The metal stove burns red in the middle

of the gas-lit room. A bowl of water is placed upon the top lest the

heat should affect our heads. All along the walls stretches the line of

our desks, and behind each of us is a little cupboard in which we keep

our books and papers. Silence reigns, and is rendered more perceptible

by the scratching of pens, the turning over of leaves, and an occasional

suppressed cough. The master is in his place, behind a desk which is

raised above the others. His name is Rodolphe Sorbelle, and he is a

poet. The other day he let fall out of his pocket a sheet of paper

covered with writing and erasures, from which we managed to make out the

following lines:

Je voudrais être oiseau des champs,

Avoir un bec,

Chanter avec:

Je voudrais être oiseau des champs,

Avoir des ailes,

Voler sur elles.

Mais je ne puis en faire autant,

Car j'ai le bec

beaucoup trop sec,

Et je suis pion,

'Cré nom de nom!

This prodigious poem gave us, cruel little wretches that we were, the

greatest delight. We sang the verses perpetually, in the dormitory, out

walking, in the playground, setting the last words to the classic music

of "Les Lampions." But the old watch-dog has sharp teeth, and defends

himself by "detentions," so none of us care to brave him to his face.

The lamp hung over his head shows up his greenish-grey hair, his red

forehead, and his threadbare coat, which once was blue. No doubt he is

rhyming, for he is writing, and every now and then he raises that

swollen brow, and his large blue eyes--which express such real kindness

when we do not torment him with our tricks--search the room and observe

in turn each of the thirty-five desks. I, too, take a prolonged survey

of the companions of my slavery; I already know their faces. There is

Rocquain, a little fellow, with a big red nose in a long white face; and

Parizelle, a tall, stout boy, with an underhung jaw. He is fair-skinned,

has green eyes and freckles, and for a wager ate a cockroach the other

day. There is Gervais, a brown, curly-haired lad, who makes his will

every week. He has communicated to me the latest of these documents, in

which there is the following clause: "I leave to Leyreloup some good

advice, contained in my letter to Cornélis." Leyreloup is his former

friend, who played him the trick of rolling him in a heap of dead leaves

last autumn, having been egged on to the deed by big Parizelle, whom the

vengeful Gervais ever since regards as a rascal, and the advice

contained in the posthumous letter is a warning to distrust the giant.

All this small school-world is absorbed in countless interests which

even at that time I held to be puerile, when compared with the thoughts

that are in me. And my schoolfellows themselves seem to understand that

there is something in my life which does not exist in theirs; they spare

me the torments that are generally inflicted upon a new boy, but I am

not the friend of any of them, except this same Gervais, who is my

walking companion when we go out. Gervais is an imaginative lad, and

when he is at home he devours a collection of the _Journal pour Tous_.

He has found in it a series of romances called "L'Homme aux Figures de

Cire," "Le Roi des Gabiers," "Le Chat du Bord," and Thursday after

Thursday, when we go out walking, he relates these stories to me. The

tragic strain of my own fate is the cause of my taking a grim pleasure

in these narratives, in which crime plays the chief part. Unfortunately

I have confided the secret of this questionable amusement to my good

aunt, and the head master has separated the improvised feuilletoniste

from his public. Gervais and I are forbidden to walk together. My aunt

believed that the excess of sensitiveness in me, which alarmed her,

would be corrected by this. Neither her solicitous tenderness, nor her

pious care and foresight--she comes to Versailles from Compiègne every

Sunday to take me out--nor my studies--for I redouble my efforts so that

my stepfather should not triumph in my bad marks--nor my religious

enthusiasm--for I have become the most fervent of us all at the

chapel--no, nothing, nothing appeases the hidden demon which possesses

and devours me. While the evening studies are going on, and in the

interval between two tasks, I read a letter from Italy. This is my food

for the week, conveyed in pages written by my mother. They give me

details of her travels, which I do not understand very clearly; but I do

understand that she is happy without me, outside of me--that the thought

of my father and his mysterious death no longer haunts her; above all,

that she loves her new husband, and I am jealous--miserably, basely

jealous. My imagination, which has its strange lapses, has also a

singular minuteness. I see my mother in a room in a foreign inn, and

spread out upon the table are the various fittings of her

travelling-bag, silver-mounted, with her cipher in relief, the Christian

name in full, and encircling it the letter T. Marie T----. Well, had she

not the right to make a new life for herself, honourably? Why should

this mixture of her past with her present hurt me so much? So much, that

just now, when stretched upon my narrow iron bed in the dormitory, I

could not close my eyes.

How long those nights seemed to me, when I lay down oppressed by this

thought, and strove in vain to lose it in the sweet oblivion of sleep! I

prayed to God for sleep, with all the strength of my childlike piety. I

said mentally twelve times twelve _Paters_ and _Aves_--and I did not

sleep. I then tried to "form a chimera;" for thus I called a strange

faculty with which I knew myself to be endowed. When I was quite a

little boy, on an occasion when I was suffering from toothache, I had

shut my eyes, forcibly abstracted my mind, and compelled it to represent

a happy scene in which I was the chief actor. Thus I was enabled to

overrule my sensations to the point of becoming insensible to the

toothache. Now, whenever I suffer, I do the same, and the device is

almost always successful. I employ it in vain when my mother is in

question. Instead of the picture of felicity which I evoke, the other

picture presents itself to me, that of the intimate life of the being

whom in all the world I most love, with the man whom I most hate. For I

hate him, with an implacable hatred, and without being able to assign

any other motive than that he has taken the first place in the heart

which was all my own. Ah, me! I shall hear the slow hours struck, first

from the belfry of a church hard by, and then by the school-clock--a

grave and sonorous chime, then a treble ringing. I shall hear old

Sorbelle walk through the whole length of the dormitory, and then go

into the room which he occupies at the far end. How dull is the

spectacle of the two rows of our little beds, with their brass knobs

shining in the dim light; and how odious it is to be listening to the

snores of the sleepers! At measured intervals the watchman, an old

soldier with a big face and thick black moustaches, passes. He is

wrapped in a brown cloth cape, and carries a dark lantern. Can it be

that he is not afraid, all alone, at night, in those long passages, and

on the stone staircases, where the wind rushes about with a dismal

noise? How I should hate to be obliged to go down those stairs,

shuddering in that darkness with the fear of meeting a ghost! I try to

drive away this new idea, but in vain, and then I think. . . . Where is

he who killed my father? Is it with fear, is it with horror that I

shudder at this question? And I go on thinking. . . . Does he know that

I am here? Panic seizes upon me, with the idea that the assassin might

be capable of assuming the disguise of a school servant, for the purpose

of killing me also. I commend my soul to God, and in the midst of these

awful thoughts I fall asleep at length, very late, to be awakened with a

start at half-past five in the morning, with an aching head, shaken

nerves, and an ailing mind, sick of a disease which is beyond cure.

VI

Three years have passed away since the autumnal evening on which a

hackney-coach had set down my stepfather and myself in that corner of

one of the gloomy avenues of Old Versailles, which is made more gloomy

by the walls of the school. I was to have remained at this school for

ten months only--the period of my mother's stay in Italy. That evening

was in the autumn of 1866; we are now in the winter of 1870, and I have

been all this time imprisoned in the Lycée, "where the air is so good,

and I get on so well." These are the reasons assigned by my mother for

not taking me back to her home. My schoolfellows pass before me in the

twilight of remembrance of that distant time. Rocquain, more pasty-faced

than ever, with his comic-actor-like red nose, sings café-concert

songs, smokes cigarettes in secret places, and collects the photographs

of actresses. Gervais, still brown and surly, has a passion for races,

at which he is always playing, and is reconciled with Leyreloup, "the

hedgehog," as we call him, whom he has infected with his dangerous

mania. The two are constantly arranging insect or tortoise

steeple-chases. They have even contrived a betting system, and ten of us

have joined in it. The game is played by placing in front of a

dictionary several bits of paper with the name of a horse written upon

each of them. The dictionary is then opened and shut rapidly, and the

bit of paper which is blown farthest away by the little breeze thus

created, is the winner, and the boys who have backed it divide the

stakes. Parizelle is bigger than ever; at sixteen he is already growing

a beard, and has been entertained by some military acquaintances at a

certain café, which he points out to us when we take our weekly walks.

As for myself, I have a new friend, one Joseph Dediot, who has

introduced me to some of the verses of De Musset. We go wild over this

poet. Dediot's place in the schoolroom is by the side of Scelles, the

bookseller's son, whom we call Bel-Œil, because he squints. Bel-Œil is

as lazy as a lobster, and Dediot has made the oddest bargain with him.

Dediot does all his exercises, and in return for each, Bel-Œil hands

over to him a copy of twenty lines of Rolla. In exchange for I know not

how many versions, themes, and Latin verses, my friend has at last

secured the entire poem, and we spout its most characteristic lines

enthusiastically.

We have become sceptics and misanthropes. We play at despairing Atheism

just as Parizelle and Rocquain play at debauchery, Gervais and others at

sport and fashion, politics and love. Old Sorbelle, having been

dismissed from the Lycée, has just published a pamphlet in which he

figures under the name of Lebros, and the Provost under that of M.

Bifteck. This little book occupies our attention throughout the whole

winter, and induces us to form a conspiracy which leads to nothing. Here

we are, then, playing at revolution! What a strange discipline is that

of those infamous schools, where young boys ruin their years of unhappy

youth by the puerile and premature imitation of passions from which they

will have to suffer in reality some day, just as children, who are

destined to die in war as men, play at soldiers, with their flaxen curls

and their ringing laughter! Alas! for me the game was over too soon.

Nevertheless, this shabby, dull, mean school was my home, the only place

in which I felt myself really "at home," and I loved it. Yes, I loved

that hulks which was also partly barracks and partly hospital, because

there at all events I was not perpetually confronted with the evidence

of my double misfortune. After all, the influence of my age made itself

felt there, the nervous strain upon me was relaxed, and I escaped from

the fixed idea of the murderer of my father to be discovered, and my

stepfather to be detested. My half-holidays were such misery to me that

they would have made me dread the termination of my school-time, only

that I knew the same date would place me in possession of my fortune,

enabling me to devote myself entirely to the supreme aim and purpose of

my life. I had sworn to myself that the mysterious assassin whom justice

had failed to discover should be unearthed by me, and I derived

extraordinary moral strength from that resolution, which I kept strictly

to myself, without ever speaking of it. This, however, did not prevent

me from suffering from trifles, whenever those trifles were signs of my

doubly-orphaned state. How clearly present to me now are the torments of

those sortie days! When the servant who was to take me to my mother's

abode comes to fetch me on those Sunday mornings at eight, his careless

manner makes me feel that I am no longer the son of the house. This

wretch, this François Niquet, with his shaven chin and his insolent

eye, does not remove his hat when I come down into the parlour.

Sometimes, when the weather is bad, he presumes to grumble, and,

although the smell of tobacco makes me sick, he lights his pipe in the

railway carriage, and smokes without asking my leave. I would rather die

than make any observation upon this, because I had once complained of my

stepfather's valet, a vile fellow whom they made out to be in the right

as against me, and I then and there resolved that never again would I

expose myself to a similar affront. Besides, I had already suffered too

much, and thus to suffer teaches one to feel contempt. The train

proceeds, and I do not exchange a dozen words with the fellow. I know

that I am regarded as proud and unamiable; but the same bent of mind

which made me sullen when quite a child, now makes me take a pleasure in

displeasing those whom I dislike. Amid silence and the reek of coarse

tobacco, we reach the Montparnasse Station, where no carriage ever

awaits me, no matter how bad the weather may be. We take the Boulevard

Latour-Maubourg, and pass by the long avenues lined with buildings,

hospitals, and bric-à-brac shops, turn down by the Church of Saint

François Xavier, cross the Place des Invalides, and reach the door of

our hotel. I hate the concierge, also a creature of M. Termonde's, and

his broad flat face, in which I read hostility which is no doubt

absolute indifference. But everything transforms itself into a sign of

enmity, to my mind, from the faces of the servants, even to the aspect

of my own room. M. Termonde has taken my own dear old room from me; a

large handsome room, which used to be flooded with sunshine, with a

window opening on the garden, and a door communicating with my mother's

apartment. I now occupy a sort of large closet, with a northern aspect

and no view except that of a wood-stack. When I reach home on those

Sunday mornings, I have to go straight to this room and wait there until

my mother has risen and can receive me. No one has taken the trouble to

light a fire; so I ask for one, and while the servant is blowing at the

logs, I take a chair, and gaze at the portrait of my father, which is

now banished to my quarters after having figured for so long upon an

easel draped with black, in my mother's morning-room. The odour of damp

wood in process of kindling is mingled with the musty flavour of the

room, which has been shut up all the week. I have some bitter moments to

pass there. These mean miseries make me feel the moral forsakenness of

my position more keenly, more cruelly. And my mother lives, she breathes

at the distance of a few steps from me; yes, and she loves me!

Now that I can cast a look back upon my unhappy youth, I am aware that

my own temper had much to do with the misunderstanding between my poor

mother and myself which has never ceased to exist. Yes, she loved me,

and at the same time she loved her husband. It was for me to explain to

her the sort of pain she caused me by uniting and mingling those two

affections in her heart. She would have understood me, she would have

spared me the series of small dumb troubles that ultimately made any

explanation between us impossible. When at length I saw her on those

"sortie" days, at about eleven, just before breakfast, she expected me

to meet her with effusive delight; how should she know that the presence

of her husband paralysed me, just as it had done when we parted before

her journey to Italy? There was an incomprehensible mystery to her in

that absolute incapacity for revealing my mind, that stony inertness

which overwhelmed me so soon as we were not alone, she and I--and we

were never alone. She used to come to see me at Versailles once a week,

on Wednesday, and it hardly ever happened that she came without my

stepfather. I never wrote a letter to her that she did not show to her

husband; indeed, he saw every letter which she received. How well I knew

this habit of hers, how she would say, "André has written to me," and

then hand to him the sheet of paper on which I could not trace one

sincere, heartfelt, trustful line, because of the idea that his eyes

were to rest upon it! How many notes have I torn up in which I tried to

tell her the story of the troubles amid which I lived! Yes, yes, I ought

to have spoken to her, nevertheless, to have explained myself a little,

confessed my sufferings, my wild jealousy, my brooding grief, my great

need of having a corner in her thoughts for myself alone, were it only

pity--but I dared not. It was in my nature to feel the pain that I must

cause her by speaking thus, too strongly, and I was unable to bear it.

All the various trouble of my heart then was bound up in a timid

silence, in embarrassment in her presence which affected herself. Like

many women she was unable to understand a disposition different from her

own, a manner of feeling opposed to hers. She was happy in her second

marriage, she loved, she was loved. In M. Termonde she had met a man to

whom she had given her whole self, but she had also given to me freely,

lavishly. I was her son, it seemed so natural to her that he whom she

loved should also love her child. And, in fact, had not M. Termonde been

to me a vigilant and irreproachable protector? Had he not carefully

provided for every detail of my education? No doubt he had insisted upon

my being sent to school as a boarder, but I had also been of his opinion

as to that. He had chosen masters for me in all branches of instruction;

I learned fencing, riding, dancing, music, foreign languages. He had

attended to, and he continued to attend to, the smallest details, from

the New Year's gift that I was to receive--it was always very

handsome--to the fixing of my allowance, my "week," as we called it,

which was paid on each Thursday, at the highest figure permitted by the

rules of the Lycée. Never had this man, who was so imperious by nature,

raised his voice in speaking to me. Never once since his marriage had he

varied from the most perfect politeness towards me; a woman who was in

love with him would naturally see in this a proof of exquisite tact and

devoted affection. Put my grievances against my stepfather into words?

No, I could not do it. And so I was silent, and how was my mother to

explain my sullenness, the absence of any demonstrativeness on my part

towards my stepfather otherwise than by my selfishness and want of

feeling? She did believe me, in fact, to be a selfish and unfeeling boy,

and I, owing to my unhealthy mood of mind, felt that when I was in her

presence I really became what she believed me. I shrank into myself like

a surly animal. But why did she not spare me those trials which

completed our alienation from each other? Why, when we met on those

wretched Sundays, did she not contrive that I should have the five

minutes alone with her that would have enabled me, not to talk to her--I

did not ask so much--but to embrace her, as I loved her, with all my

heart? I came into the room which she had transformed into a private

sitting-room--in every corner of it I had played at my free pleasure

when I, the spoiled child whose lightest wish was a command, was the

master--and there was M. Termonde in his morning costume, smoking

cigarettes and reading newspapers. It needed nothing but the rustic of

the sheet in his hand, the tone of his voice as he bade me good-day, the

touch of his fingers--he merely gave me their tips--and I recoiled upon

myself. So strong was my antipathy that I never remember to have eaten

with a good appetite at the same table with him. My wretchedness was at

its height during those Sunday breakfasts and dinners. Ah, I hated

everything about him; his blue eyes, almost too far apart, which were

sometimes fixed, and at others rolled slightly in their orbits, his high

prominent forehead, and prematurely grey hair, the refinement of his

features, and the elegance of his manners, such a contrast with my

natural dulness and lack of ease--yes, I hated all these, and even to

the finely-shaped foot which was set off by his perfect boots. I think

that even now, at this present hour, I should recognise a coat he had

worn, among a thousand, so living a thing has a garment of his seemed to

me, under the influence of that aversion. Only too well did I, with my

filial instinct, realise that he, with his slender graceful figure, his

feline movements, his flattering voice, his native and acquired

aristocratic ways, was the true husband of the lovely, highly-adorned,

almost ideal creature whom I, her son, resembled as little as my poor

father had resembled her. Ah, how bitter was that knowledge!

Out of the depths of the silence which I preserved on those wretched

half-holidays, I followed with intense interest all the conversations

that took place before me, especially during breakfast and dinner, in

the dining-room--newly furnished, like all the rest of the house. The

hours of those meals were no longer the hours of my father's time. This

change, and the new furnishing of our dwelling, typified the newness of

my mother's life. M. Termonde, who was the son of a stockbroker, and had

been for some time in diplomacy, had kept up social relations of a kind

quite different from our former ones. My mother and he went frequently

into that mixed and cosmopolitan society which was then, and is now,

called "smart." What had become of the familiar faces at the dinners,

few and far between, which my father used to give at the Rue Tronchet?

Those dinner parties consisted of three or four persons, the ladies in

high gowns, and the gentlemen in morning dress. The talk was of politics

and business; a former Minister of King Louis Philippe's, who had gone

back to his practice at the bar, was the oracle of the little circle;

and the dinner hour was half-past six, instead of seven, on those days,

because the old statesman always retired to rest at ten o'clock. In the

wealthy but plain bourgeois life of our home, to go to a theatre was an

event, and a ball formed an epoch. Thus, at least, did things represent

themselves to my childish mind. Now the old ex-Minister came to the

house no more, nor Mdme. Largeyx, the engineer's widow, whom papa was

always quoting to mamma as a model, and whom my mother laughingly called

her "mother-in-law." Now, my mother and my stepfather went out almost

every evening. They had horses and several carriages, instead of the

coupé hired by the month with which the wife of the renowned lawyer had

been content. All the men who came in after dinner, all the women whom I

met at six o'clock in my mother's drawing-room, were young and full of

life and spirits, and their talk was solely of amusements; new plays,

fancy balls, races, and dress. My father, who was full of the ideas of

the Monarchy of July, like his old political friend, used to speak

severely of the imperial régime; but now, my mother was invited to the

great receptions at the Tuileries. How could I have ventured to talk to

her about the small miseries of my school life, which seemed to me so

mean when I contrasted them with her brilliant and opulent existence?

Formerly, when I was a day pupil at the Bonaparte, I used to relate to

her every trifle concerning the school and my fellow pupils; but now, I

should have been ashamed to bore her with Rocquain, Gervais, Leyreloup,

and the rest. It seemed to me that she could not possibly be interested

in the story of how Joseph Dediot had been traitorously deserted by his

faithless cousin Cécile; and yet, how tragic the case was, to my mind!

Notwithstanding that two locks of hair had been exchanged, a bouquet

offered and accepted, a kiss snatched and returned, the false girl had

married an apothecary at Avranches. Dediot had even written two poems,

inspired by his misfortune, and one of them, dedicated to me, began

thus:

Sèche ton cœur, André, ne sois jamais aimant.

How could I have talked of all these small things to a lady who dined

with the Duchesse d'Arcole, whose intimate friends were a Maréchale and

two Marquises, and whose entertainments were described in the society

journals? My mother was now the beautiful Madame Termonde, and so

completely had her new name replaced the old, that I was almost the only

person who remembered she was also the widow of M. Cornélis, he whose

tragical death had been related in the very same newspapers. Had she

herself forgotten it?

"Forgetfulness! Is this then in all reality the world's law?" I asked

myself, with the indignant revolt of a young heart, which does not admit

the inevitable compromises of feeling. And I made answer to myself, No!

There was one person who remembered as well as I did, one person to whom

my father's death still remained a hideous nightmare, one person to whom

I could tell all my thoughts and all my grief--my dear, good, kind aunt.

In her case at least all the fond and tender things of the past remained

unchanged. When August came, and I went to Compiègne for a portion of

my holidays, I found everything in its place, both in the house and in

the heart of the dear old maid.

For my sake, I knew it well, she had consented to keep up her former

relations with my mother, and she dined with her three or four times a

year. Dear Aunt Louise! She would listen with the utmost kindness to all

my childish complaints, and she always sent me home softened, almost

appeased; more indulgent towards my mother, and convinced that I was

wrong in my judgment of M. Termonde.

Nevertheless, I did not tell Aunt Louise anything about my reprisals

upon the man whom I accused of having stolen my mother's heart from me.

I had perceived, very soon, certain signs of an antipathy towards myself

on the part of my stepfather, similar to that which I entertained

towards him. When I came rather suddenly into the salon, and he was

engaged in a conversation either with my mother or one of his friends,

my presence sufficed to cause a slight alteration in his voice; a change

which, most likely, no one else would have perceived, but which did not

escape me, for did not my own throat contract, and my lips quiver with

sheer abhorrence?

I should not have been the sullen and resentful boy I then was, if I had

not planned how to utilise my strange power of disturbing the man whom I

execrated, in the interest of my enmity. My system was to force him to

feel the acute sensation which my presence inflicted on him, by keeping

silence, and steadily pursuing him with my gaze. Great as his

self-control was, I never fixed my eyes upon him from the far end of the

room, but, after a while, he would turn his eyes towards me. Then his

glance avoided mine, and he would go on talking; but still he was

looking at me, and presently our eyes would meet, and his would shift

away again. I knew, by a frown which gathered on his forehead, that he

was on the point of forbidding me to look at him in that way; but then

he would put strong restraint upon himself, and sometimes he would leave

the room.

That abstention from any kind of struggle with me was a fixed resolution

on his part, I guessed, because I knew him to be very determined by

nature, and especially incapable of enduring that any one should brave

him. He was fond of relating how, in his youth, when he was attached to

the Embassy at Madrid, he had killed a bull at an amateur "ring," on

being "dared" to do it by a young Spaniard. It must have hurt his pride

severely to permit me the silent insolence of my eyes; he did allow me

to indulge it, however, and I did not acknowledge that petty triumph to

Aunt Louise. I must set down everything here, and the truth is I was

most unhappy; I knew myself to be so, and I did not lessen my trouble in

the least in dilating upon it; on the contrary, I rather exaggerated it

so as to win that tender sympathy which did my sore heart good.

I once spoke to her of the vow I had taken, the solemn promise I had

made to myself that I would discover the murderer of my father, and take

vengeance upon him, and she laid her hand upon my mouth. She was a pious

woman, and she repeated the words of the gospel: "Vengeance is mine,

saith the Lord." Then she added: "We must leave the punishment of the

crime to Him; His will is hidden from us. Remember the divine precept

and promise, 'Forgive and you shall be forgiven.' Never say: 'An eye for

an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' Ah, no; drive this enmity out of your

heart, Cornélis; yes, even this." And there were tears in her eyes.

VII

My poor aunt! She thought me made of stronger stuff than I really was.

There was no need of her advice to prevent my being consumed by the

desire for vengeance which had been the fixed star of my early youth,

the blood-coloured beacon aflame in my night. Ah! the resolutions of

boyhood, the "oaths of Hannibal" taken to ourselves, the dream of

devoting all our strength to one single and unchanging aim--life sweeps

all that away, together with our generous illusions, ardent enthusiasm,

and noble hopes. What a difference there is between the boy of fifteen,

unhappy indeed, but so bold and proud in 1870, and the young man of

eight years later, in 1878! And to think, only to think, that but for

chance occurrences, impossible to foresee, I should still be, at this

hour, the young man whose portrait hangs upon the wall above the table

at which I am writing. Of a surety, the visitors to the Salon of that

year (1878) who looked at this portrait among so many others, had no

suspicion that it represented the son of a father who had come to so

tragic an end. And I, when I look at that commonplace image of an

ordinary Parisian, with eyes unlit by any fire or force of will,

complexion paled by senseless dissipation, hair cut in the fashion of

the day, strictly correct dress and attitude, I am astonished to think

that I could have lived as I actually did live at that period. Between

the misfortunes that saddened my childhood, and those of quite recent

date which have finally laid waste my life, the course of my existence

was colourless, monotonous, vulgar, just like that of anybody else. I

shall merely note the stages of it.

In the second half of 1870 the Franco-Prussian war takes place. The

invasion finds me at Compiègne, where I am passing my holidays with my

aunt. My stepfather and my mother remain in Paris during the siege. I go

on with my studies under the tuition of an old priest belonging to the

little town, who prepared my father for his first communion. In the

autumn of 1871 I return to Versailles; in August, 1873, I take my

bachelor's degree, and then I do my one year's voluntary service in the

army at Angers under the easiest possible conditions. My colonel was the

father of my old schoolfellow, Rocquain. In 1874 I am set free from

tutelage by my stepfather's advice. This was the moment at which my task

was to have been begun, the time appointed with my own soul; yet, four

years afterwards, in 1878, not only was the vengeance that had been the

tragic romance, and, so to speak, the religion of my childhood,

unfulfilled, but I did not trouble myself about it.

I was cruelly ashamed of my indifference when I thought about it; but I

am now satisfied that it was not so much the result of weakness of

character as of causes apart from myself which would have acted in the

same way upon any young man placed in my situation. From the first, and

when I faced my task of vengeance, an insurmountable obstacle arose

before me. It is equally easy and sublime to strike an attitude and

exclaim: "I swear that I will never rest until I have punished the

guilty one." In reality, one never acts except in detail, and what could

I do? I had to proceed in the same way as justice had proceeded, to

reopen the inquiry which had been pushed to its extremity without any

result.

I began with the Judge of Instruction, who had had the carriage of the

matter, and who was now a Counsellor of the Court. He was a man of

fifty, very quiet and plain in his way, and he lived in the Ile de

Paris, on the first floor of an ancient house, from whose windows he

could see Nôtre Dame, primitive Paris, and the Seine, which is as

narrow as a canal at that place.

M. Massol, so he was named, was quite willing to resume with me the

analysis of the data which had been furnished by the Instruction. No

doubt existed either as to the personality of the assassin, or the hour

at which the crime was committed. My father had been killed between two

and three o'clock in the day, without a struggle, by that tall,

broad-shouldered personage whose extraordinary disguise indicated,

according to the magistrate, "an amateur." Excess of complication is

always an imprudence, for it multiplies the chances of failure. Had the

assassin dyed his skin and worn a wig because my father knew him by

sight? To this M. Massol said "No; for M. Cornélis, who was very

observant, and who, besides, was on his guard--this is evident from his

last words when he left you--would have recognised him by his voice, his

glance, and his attitude. A man cannot change his height and his figure,

although he may change his face." M. Massol's theory of this disguise

was that the wearer had adopted it in order to gain time to get out of

France, should the corpse be discovered on the day of the murder.

Supposing that a description of a man with a very brown complexion and a

black beard had been telegraphed in every direction, the assassin,

having washed off his paint, laid aside his wig and beard, and put on

other clothes, might have crossed the frontier without arousing the

slightest suspicion. There was reason to believe that the pretended

Rochdale lived abroad. He had spoken in English at the hotel, and the

people there had taken him for an American; it was therefore presumable

either that he was a native of the United States, or that he habitually

resided there. The criminal was, then, a foreigner, American or English,

or perhaps a Frenchman settled in America. As for the motive of so

complicated a crime, it was difficult to admit that it could be robbery

alone. "And yet," observed the Judge of Instruction, "we do not know

what the note-case carried off by the assassin contained. But," he added,

"the hypothesis of robbery seems to me to be utterly routed by the fact

that, while Rochdale stripped the dead man of his watch, he left a ring,

which was much more valuable, on his finger. From this I conclude that

he took the watch merely as a precaution to throw the police off the

scent. My supposition is that the man killed M. Cornélis for revenge."