THE HOUSE WITH TWO DOORS.
On the site of the old Palais des Tournelles, where was held the
tournament in which Henry the Second was killed, Henry the Fourth
built the Place Royale. You will not find it called by that name in
any map of Paris of to-day; modern France, which has no history,
traditions, or reverence, has carefully erased such landmarks in
favour of her Grevys and Eiffels, her journalists and soap-boilers.
But for all that, and though the Place Royale has now lost even its
name, in the reign of the thirteenth Louis it was the centre of
fashion. The Quartier du Marais, in which it stood, opposite the Ile
de St. Louis, was then the Court quarter. It saw coaches come into
common use among the nobility, and ruffs and primero go out, and a
great many other queer things, such as Court quarters in those days
looked to see.
The back stairs of a palace, however, are seldom an improving or
brilliant place; or if they can be said to be brilliant at all, their
brightness is of a somewhat lurid and ghastly character. The king's
amusements--very royal and natural, no doubt, and, when viewed from
the proper quarter, attractive enough--have another side; and that
side is towards the back stairs. It is the same with the Court and its
purlieus. They are the rough side of the cloth, the underside of the
moss, the cancer under the fair linen. Secrets are no secrets there;
and so it has always been. Things De Thou did not know, and Brantome
only guessed at, were household words there. They in the Court
under-world knew all about that mysterious disease of which Gabrielle
d'Estrees died after eating a citron at Zamet's--all, more than we
know now or has ever been printed. That little prick of a knife which
made the second Wednesday in May, 1610, a day memorable in history,
was gossip down there a month before. Henry of Conde's death,
Mazarin's marriage, D'Eon's sex, Cagliostro's birth, were no mysteries
in the by-ways of the Louvre and Petit Trianon. He who wrote "Under
the king's hearthstone are many cockroaches" knew his world--a seamy,
ugly, vicious, dangerous world.
If any street in the Paris of that day belonged to it, the Rue
Touchet did; a little street a quarter of a mile from the Place
Royale, on the verge of the Quartier du Marais. The houses on one side
of the street had their backs to the river, from which they were
divided only by a few paces of foul foreshore. These houses were older
than the opposite row, were irregularly built, and piled high with
gables and crooked chimneys. Here and there a beetle-browed passage
led beneath them to the river; and one out of every two was a tavern,
or worse. A fencing-school and a gambling-hell occupied the two
largest. To the south-west the street ended in a _cul-de-sac_, being
closed by a squat stone house, built out of the ruins of an old water
gateway that had once stood there. The windows of this house were
never unshuttered, the door was seldom opened in the daylight. It was
the abode of Solomon Notredame. Once a week or so the astrologer's
sombre figure might be seen entering or leaving, and men at tavern
doors would point at him, and slatternly women, leaning out of window,
cross themselves. But few in the Rue Touchet knew that the house had a
second door, which did not open on the water, as the back doors of the
riverside houses did, but on a quiet street leading to it.
M. Notredame's house was, in fact, double, and served two sorts of
clients. Great ladies and courtiers, wives of the long robe and city
madams, came to the door in the quiet street, and knew nothing of the
Rue Touchet. Through the latter, on the other hand, came those who
paid in meal, if not in malt; lackeys and waiting-maids, and skulking
apprentices and led-captains--the dregs of the quarter, sodden with
vice and crime--and knowledge.
The house was furnished accordingly. The clients of the Rue Touchet
found the astrologer in a room divided into two by scarlet hangings,
so arranged as to afford the visitor a partial view of the farther
half, where the sullen glow of a furnace disclosed alembics and
crucibles, mortars and retorts, a multitude of uncouth vessels and
phials, and all the mysterious apparatus of the alchemist. Immediately
about him the shuddering rascal found things still more striking. A
dead hand hung over each door, a skeleton peeped from a closet. A
stuffed alligator sprawled on the floor, and, by the wavering
uncertain light of the furnace, seemed each moment to be awaking to
life. Cabalistic signs and strange instruments and skull-headed staves
were everywhere, with parchment scrolls and monstrous mandrakes, and a
farrago of such things as might impose on the ignorant; who, if he
pleased, might sit on a coffin, and, when he would amuse himself,
found a living toad at his foot! Dimly seen, crowded together,
ill-understood, these things were enough to overawe the vulgar, and
had often struck terror into the boldest ruffians the Rue Touchet
could boast.
From this room a little staircase, closed at the top by a strong door,
led to the chamber and antechamber in which the astrologer received
his real clients. Here all was changed. Both rooms were hung,
canopied, carpeted with black: were vast, death-like, empty. The
antechamber contained two stools, and in the middle of the floor a
large crystal ball on a bronze stand. That was all, except the silver
hanging lamp, which burned blue, and added to the funereal gloom of
the room.
The inner chamber, which was lighted by six candles set in sconces
round the wall, was almost as bare. A kind of altar at the farther end
bore two great tomes, continually open. In the middle of the floor was
an astrolabe on an ebony pillar, and the floor itself was embroidered
in white, with the signs of the Zodiac and the twelve Houses arranged
in a circle. A seat for the astrologer stood near the altar. And that
was all. For power over such as visited him here Notredame depended on
a higher range of ideas; on the more subtle forms of superstition, the
influence of gloom and silence on the conscience: and above all,
perhaps, on his knowledge of the world--_and them_.
Into the midst of all this came that shrinking, terrified little
mortal, Jehan. It was his business to open the door into the quiet
street, and admit those who called. He was forbidden to speak under
the most terrible penalties, so that visitors thought him dumb. For a
week after his coming he lived in a world of almost intolerable fear.
The darkness and silence of the house, the funereal lights and
hangings, the skulls and bones and horrid things he saw, and on which
he came when he least expected them, almost turned his brain. He
shuddered, and crouched hither and thither. His face grew white, and
his eyes took a strange staring look, so that the sourest might have
pitied him. It wanted, in a word, but a little to send the child stark
mad; and but for his hardy training and outdoor life, that little
would not have been wanting.
He might have fled, for he was trusted at the door, and at any moment
could have opened it and escaped. But Jehan never doubted his master's
power to find him and bring him back; and the thought did not enter
his mind. After a week or so, familiarity wrought on him, as on all.
The house grew less terrifying, the darkness lost its horror, the air
of silence and dread its first paralysing influence. He began to sleep
better. Curiosity, in a degree, took the place of fear. He fell to
poring over the signs of the Zodiac, and to taking furtive peeps into
the crystal. The toad became his playfellow. He fed it with
cockroaches, and no longer wanted employment.
The astrologer saw the change in the lad, and perhaps was not wholly
pleased with it. By-and-by he took steps to limit it. One day he found
Jehan playing with the toad with something of a boy's _abandon_,
making the uncouth creature leap over his hands, and tickling it with
a straw. The boy rose on his entrance, and shrank away; for his fear
of the man's sinister face and silent ways was not in any way
lessened. But Notredame called him back. "You are beginning to
forget," he said, eyeing the child grimly.
The boy trembled under his gaze, but did not dare to answer.
"Whose are you?"
Jehan looked this way and that. At length, with dry lips, he muttered,
"Yours."
"No, you are not," the man in black replied. "Think again. You have a
short memory."
Jehan thought and sweated. But the man would have his answer, and at
last Jehan whispered, "The devil's."
"That is better," the astrologer said coldly. "Do you know what this
is?"
He held up a glass bowl. The boy recognised it, and his hair began to
rise. But he shook his head.
"It is holy water," the man in black said, his small cruel eyes
devouring the boy. "Hold out your hand."
Jehan dared not refuse "This will try you," Notredame said slowly,
"whether you are the devil's or not. If not, water will not hurt you.
If so, if you are his for ever and ever, to do his will and pleasure,
then it will burn like fire!"
At the last word he suddenly sprinkled some with a brush on the boy's
hand. Jehan leapt back with a shriek of pain, and, holding the burned
hand to his breast, glared at his master with starting eyes.
"It burns," said the astrologer pitilessly, "It burns. It is as I
said. You are _his_. _His!_ After this I think you will remember. Now
go."
Jehan went away, shuddering with horror and pain. But the lesson had
not the precise effect intended. He continued to fear his master, but
he began to hate him also, with a passionate, lasting hatred strange
in a child. Though he still shrank and crouched in his presence,
behind his back he was no longer restrained by fear. The boy knew of
no way in which he could avenge himself. He did not form any plans to
that end, he did not conceive the possibility of the thing. But he
hated; and, given the opportunity, was ripe to seize it.
[Illustration: "JEHAN LEAPT BACK WITH A SHRIEK OF PAIN" (_p_. 74).]
He was locked in whenever Notredame went out; and in this way he spent
many solitary and fearful hours. These led him, however, in the end,
to a discovery. One day, about the middle of December, while he was
poking about the house in the astrologer's absence, he found a door. I
say "found," for though it was not a secret door, it was small and
difficult to detect, being placed in the side of the straight, narrow
passage at the head of the little staircase which led from the lower
to the upper chambers. At first he thought it was locked, but coming
to examine it more closely, though in mere curiosity, he found the
handle of the latch let into a hollow of the panel. He pressed this,
and the door yielded a little.
At the time the boy was scared. He saw the place was dark, drew the
door to the jamb again, and went away without satisfying his
curiosity. But in a little while the desire to know what was behind
the door overcame his terror. He returned with a taper, and, pressing
the latch again, pushed the door open and entered, his heart beating
loudly.
He held up his taper, and saw a very narrow, bare closet, made in the
thickness of the wall. And that was all, for the place was empty--the
one and only thing it contained being a soft, rough mat which covered
the floor. The boy stared fearfully about him, still expecting
something dreadful, but there was nothing else to be seen. And
gradually his fears subsided, and his curiosity with them, and he went
out again.
Another day, however, when he came into this place, he made a
discovery. Against either wall he saw a morsel of black cloth
fastened--a little flap a few inches long and three inches wide. He
held the light first to one and then to another of these, but he could
make nothing of them until he noticed that the lower edges were loose.
Then he raised one. It disclosed a long, narrow slit, through which he
could see the laboratory, with the fire burning dully, the phials
glistening, and the crocodile going through its unceasing pretence of
arousing itself. He raised the other, and found a slit there, too; but
as the chamber on that side--the room with the astrolabe--was in
darkness, he could see nothing. He understood, however. The closet was
a spying-place, and these were Judas-holes, so arranged that the
occupant, himself unheard and unseen, could see and hear all that
happened on either side of him.
It was the astrologer's custom to lock up the large room next the Rue
Touchet when he went out. For this reason, and because the place was
forbidden, the boy lingered at the Judas-hole, gazing into it. He knew
by this time most of the queer things it contained, and the red glow
of the furnace fire gave it, to his mind, a weird kind of comfort. He
listened to the ashes falling, and the ticking of some clockwork at
the farther end. He began idly to enumerate all the things he could
see; but the curtain which shut off the laboratory proper threw a
great shadow across the room, and this he strove in vain to pierce. To
see the better, he put out his light and looked again. He had scarcely
brought his eyes back to the slit, however, when a low grating noise
caught his ear. He started and held his breath, but before he could
stir a finger the heavy door which communicated with the Rue Touchet
slowly opened a foot or two, and the astrologer came in.
For a few seconds the boy remained gazing, afraid to breathe or move.
Then, with an effort, he dropped the cloth over the slit, and crept
softly away.