“It’s this confounded ring,” he cried, “which pinched my finger, and
made me miss a safe ball!”
He took off the diamond ring, not without difficulty; I went to take
it from him; but he was too quick for me and ran to the Venus, put the
ring on its ring-finger, and resumed his place at the head of the Ille
men.
He was pale, but calm and resolute. Thenceforth he did not make a
single mistake, and the Spaniards were thoroughly beaten. It was a fine
sight to see the enthusiasm of the on-lookers: some uttered a thousand
cries of joy and threw their bonnets in the air; others pressed his
hands, calling him the honour of their country. If he had repelled an
invasion, I doubt whether he would have received more lively or more
sincere congratulations. The disappointment of the losers added still
more to the brilliance of his victory.
“We’ll have other matches, my good fellow,” he said to the Aragonese
with a tone of superiority; “but I’ll give you a handicap.”
I could have wished that M. Alphonse had been more modest, and I was
almost pained at the humiliation of his rival.
The Spanish giant felt the insult keenly. I saw him turn pale under
his sunburnt skin. He looked at his racket gloomily and set his teeth;
then, in a choked voice, he said almost inaudibly, “_Me lo pagarás_.”
M. de Peyrehorade’s voice disturbed his son’s triumph; my host, much
surprised not to find him presiding over the harnessing of the new
barouche, was still more surprised to see him all in a sweat, racket
in hand. M. Alphonse ran to the house, washed his hands and face,
put his new coat and patent-leather shoes on again, and five minutes
later we were off at a brisk trot on the way to Puygarrig. All the
tennis-players of the town and a great number of on-lookers followed us
with cries of joy. The strong horses which drew us had difficulty in
keeping ahead of those intrepid Catalans.
We were at Puygarrig, and the procession was about to set out for the
mayor’s office, when M. Alphonse struck his forehead, and said to me in
an undertone:
“How stupid of me! I’ve forgotten the ring! It’s on the finger of the
Venus, the Devil take her! What ever you do, don’t mention it to my
mother. Perhaps she’ll not notice anything.”
“You could send somebody,” I said.
“Bah! My man is staying behind at Ille. And those fellows here, I
don’t much trust them. Twelve hundred francs worth of diamonds! That
would be a temptation to a good many of them. Besides, what would
they think here of my absent-mindedness? They’d make fine fun of me.
They’d call me the statue’s husband.... I just hope nobody steals it
from me! Fortunately the idol has put a fear on my rogues. They don’t
dare go within arm’s length of it. Bah! It doesn’t matter; I’ve got
another ring.” The two ceremonies, civil and religious, were performed
with due pomp; and Mademoiselle de Puygarrig received a little Paris
dress-maker’s ring, never suspecting that her bridegroom was making
the sacrifice of a love-token to her. Then we sat down to table, where
we drank, ate, even sang, all at great length. I felt for the bride in
the coarse merriment which was resounding about her; still, she kept
a better countenance than I had expected, and her embarrassment had
nothing either of awkwardness or affectation about it.
Perhaps courage comes with difficult situations.
The breakfast having terminated when it pleased Heaven, it was four
o’clock; the men went to walk in the park, which was magnificent,
or to watch the Puygarrig peasant-girls dancing on the château lawn
arrayed in their holiday clothes. In this way we spent some hours.
Meanwhile the women were very busy with the bride, who was making them
admire her wedding-presents. Then she changed her dress, and I noticed
that she covered up her fine hair with a cap and a feathered hat, for
women are in a great hurry until they have assumed as soon as possible
the ornaments which custom forbids them to wear as long as they are
unmarried.
It was almost eight o’clock when they set about starting for Ille. But
first there was a pathetic scene. Mademoiselle de Puygarrig’s aunt, who
had been a mother to her, a very aged and very devout woman, was not
to go to town with us. At her niece’s going away she made a touching
address to her on the duties of a wife, a discourse which resulted in a
torrent of tears and never-ending embraces. M. de Peyrehorade compared
this parting to the Rape of the Sabines. We set out, however, and on
the way we all did our utmost to distract the bride and make her laugh;
but in vain.
At Ille supper was waiting us, and what a supper! If I had been
disgusted at the coarse merriment of the morning, I was still more
so at the equivocations and pleasantries of which the bridegroom
and, above all, the bride were the objects. The bridegroom, who had
disappeared for an instant before sitting down to table, was pale and
icily serious. Every other minute he took a draught of old Collioure
wine, almost as strong as brandy. I was beside him, and I felt obliged
to warn him:
“Take care! They say that wine....”
I told him some nonsense or other to put myself on a level with the
other guests.
He nudged me with his knee and, in an undertone, said to me:
“When we rise from table ..., let me have a word with you.”
His grave tone surprised me. I looked more attentively at him, and I
noticed the strange alteration in his features.
“Do you feel unwell?” I asked him.
“No.”
And he fell to drinking again.
Meanwhile, amid shouts and clapping of hands, a child of eleven, who
had slipped under the table, showed the company a pretty white and
pink ribbon which he had just unfastened from the bride’s ankle. That
was called her garter. It was at once cut in pieces and distributed to
the young people, who decorated their buttonholes with it, after an
old custom, which is still maintained in some patriarchal families.
This caused the bride to blush to the whites of her eyes.... But her
distress was at a height when M. de Peyrehorade, having called for
silence, sang her certain Catalan verses, impromptu, he said. Here is
the sense of them, if I understood it aright:
“What is this, my friends! Has the wine which I have drunk made me see
double! There are two Venuses here....”
The bridegroom suddenly looked round with an air of alarm which made
everybody laugh.
“Yes,” pursued M. de Peyrehorade, “there are two Venuses under my roof.
The one, I found in the earth, like a truffle; the other, descended
from the skies, has just divided her girdle among us.”
He meant her garter.
“My son, choose which you prefer, the Roman Venus or the Catalan Venus.
The rascal takes the Catalan, and his choice is the best. The Roman is
black, the Catalan is white. The Roman is cold, the Catalan sets every
one who approaches her on fire.”
This conclusion excited such a roar, such noisy applause and such
resounding laughter, that I thought the ceiling was going to fall on
our heads. Round the table there were only three solemn faces, the
young couple’s and my own. I had a bad headache; and besides, for some
reason or other, a marriage always depresses me. This one, besides,
rather disgusted me.
The last couplets having been sung by the depute mayor--and very free
they were, I ought to mention--we went into the drawing-room to witness
the retiral of the bride, who was soon to be conducted to her chamber,
for it was near midnight. M. Alphonse drew me into a window recess, and
said, with averted eyes:
“You will laugh at me.... But I don’t know what is wrong with me.... I
am bewitched! Devil take me!”
The first thought which came into my head was that he imagined himself
threatened with some misfortune similar to those mentioned by Montaigne
and Madame de Sévigné:
“The whole Empire of Love is replete with tragic histories, etc.”
“I thought that sort of accidents never happened except to persons of
intelligence,” I said to myself.
“You’ve drunk too much Collioure, my dear Monsieur Alphonse,” I said to
him. “I warned you.”
“Yes, perhaps. But this is something much more dreadful.”
His voice was broken. I really thought he was drunk.
“You know my ring?” he continued after a pause.
“What! Has it been taken away?”
“No.”
“Then you have it, have you not?”
“No ... I ... I can’t get it off that devil of a Venus’s finger.”
“A fine story! You’ve not pulled hard enough.”
“Not at all.... But the Venus.... She has closed her finger.”
He stared at me with a haggard face, supporting himself by the
window-fastening to keep himself from falling.
“A pretty tale!” I said to him. “You have pushed the ring too far on.
You’ll get it off to-morrow with pincers. But take care not to spoil
the statue.”
“I tell you no! The Venus’s finger is turned in, crooked in; she has
her hand clenched, do you understand?... She is my wife, it seems,
since I have given her my ring.... She won’t give it back now.”
I felt a sudden shiver, and for an instant my flesh crept. Then a great
sigh that he gave sent a reek of wine over to me, and all my emotion
disappeared.
“The silly fool,” thought I, “is quite drunk.”
“You are an antiquary, sir,” the bridegroom added in a lamentable tone;
“you know about those statues ... perhaps there is some spring, some
devilment, that I don’t know about.... Would you go and see?”
“Willingly,” I said. “Come along with me.”
“No, I’d rather you went alone.”
I went out of the drawing-room. The weather had changed during supper,
and the rain was beginning to fall heavily. I was about to ask for an
umbrella, when a thought arrested me. I should be a great fool, I said
to myself, to go and verify what a drunk man had told me! Besides,
he perhaps wished to play some ill-natured joke on me to make me a
laughing-stock for those good provincials; and the least that would
result to me from it would be to get soaked to the skin and catch a bad
cold.
From the door I cast a glance at the statue all running with water,
and I went upstairs to my room without returning to the drawing-room.
I went to bed; but sleep was long of coming. All the scenes of the
day presented themselves to my mind. I thought of that young girl,
so lovely and so pure, left to the mercy of a brutal drunkard. “What
an odious thing,” I said to myself, “a marriage of convenience is! A
mayor puts on a tricolour scarf, a parson a stole, and there, the most
respectable girl in the world is handed over to the Minotaur! what can
two beings who do not love each other have to say to each other at a
moment such as this, a moment which two lovers would purchase at the
price of their lives? Can a woman ever love a man whom she has once
seen coarse? First impressions are never effaced, and I am sure of
this, that that M. Alphonse will richly deserve to be hated....”
During my monologue, which I have shortened considerably, I had heard
a great deal of coming and going in the house, doors opening and
shutting, carriages driving away; then I seemed to have heard the light
steps of a number of women on the stair, making for the end of the
corridor opposite to my room. It was probably the bride’s attendants
taking her to bed. In course of time they had gone downstairs again.
Madame de Peyrehorade’s door was shut. How anxious and uneasy that poor
girl must be, I thought! I turned about on my bed in a bad temper. A
bachelor cuts a foolish figure in a house where a marriage is being
held.
Silence reigned for some time; then it was broken by heavy steps
climbing up the stair. The wooden treads cracked loudly.
“The brute!” I exclaimed. “I’ll wager he’s going to fall on the stairs.”
All became quiet again. I took a book to change the course of my
thoughts. It was a statistical account of the department, graced with
a memorandum by M. de Peyrehorade on the druidical monuments of the
Prades hundred. I fell over at the third page.
I slept badly, and woke several times. It might be about five o’clock
in the morning, and I had been awake twenty minutes or more, when the
cock crew. Day was about to dawn. Just then I heard distinctly the same
heavy steps, the same cracking of the stair, that I had heard before
falling asleep. It struck me as strange. I yawned and tried to think
why M. Alphonse was rising so early in the morning. I could imagine no
likely reason. I was about to close my eyes again, when my attention
was excited anew by a strange trampling, with which the ringing of
bells and the sound of doors being noisily opened soon mingled; then I
made out confused cries.
“My drunk friend has set the house afire somewhere!” I thought, as I
jumped down out of bed.
I dressed in a hurry and went out into the corridor. From the opposite
end came cries and lamentations, and one heart-rending voice dominated
all the others--” My son! My son!” It was evident that some calamity
had happened to M. Alphonse. I ran to the nuptial chamber: it was
full of people. The first thing that met my view was the young man
half-clad, stretched across the bed, the frame of which was broken.
He was livid and motionless. His mother was weeping and crying at
his side. M. de Peyrehorade was busy, rubbing his temples with
eau-de-Cologne, or holding smelling-salts to his nose. Alas! his son
had been dead for a long time. On a sofa at the other end of the room
was the bride, writhing in horrible convulsions. She was uttering
inarticulate cries, and two strong servants had the utmost difficulty
in holding her.
“Good God!” I exclaimed, “whatever has happened?”
I went up to the bed and raised the unfortunate young man’s body; it
was already stiff and cold. His clenched teeth and his blackened face
gave evidence of the most frightful agony. It was only too plain that
his end had been violent and his death-struggles terrible. Yet there
was no trace of blood on his clothes. I opened his shirt, and on his
chest I saw a livid mark, which was continued round his ribs and back.
One would have thought that he had been crushed in a band of iron.
My foot trod upon something hard on the carpet; I stooped down, and saw
the diamond ring.
I drew M. de Peyrehorade and his wife into their room; then I had the
bride taken there.
“You have still a daughter,” I said to them, “you owe her your care.”
Then I left them alone.
There seemed to me no doubt that M. Alphonse had been the victim of a
murder, the perpetrators of which had found means to let themselves in
to the bride’s room at night. Yet those bruises on his chest and their
circular direction puzzled me considerably, for a stick or an iron bar
could not have produced them. All at once I remembered to have heard
that the bravos of Valencia make use of long bags of leather, stuffed
with fine sand, to knock down the persons whom they have been paid to
kill. I immediately remembered the Aragonese muleteer and his threat;
at the same time I scarcely dared to think that he had taken such a
terrible revenge for a harmless joke.
I went about the house, searching everywhere for traces of breaking
in, without finding them anywhere. I went down to the garden, to see
whether the murderers could have got in from that side; but I found
no certain traces there. Besides last night’s rain had so soaked the
earth that it could not have retained any very sharp impression. All
the same, I observed some footprints deeply imprinted in the ground;
they were in two contrary directions, but in the same line, starting
from the corner of the hedge beside the tennis-court and ending at
the house-door. They might have been made by M. Alphonse when he went
to look for his ring on the statue’s finger. On the other hand, the
hedge at that place was not so close as elsewhere; that must have
been the spot where the murderers crossed it. Passing and repassing
before the statue, I halted for a moment to look at it. This time, I
confess, I could not contemplate its expression of ironical wickedness
without fear; and, my head full of the horrible scenes which I had
just witnessed, I seemed to behold an infernal deity applauding the
misfortune which had overtaken that house.
I got back to my room and remained there until midday. Then I went to
inquire for my hosts. They were a little more composed. Mademoiselle
de Puygarrig--I ought to say M. Alphonse’s widow--had recovered
consciousness. She had even spoken with the public prosecutor from
Perpignan, who was then on circuit at Ille, and that official had taken
her deposition. He asked for mine. I told him what I knew, and did not
conceal my suspicions about the Aragonese muleteer. He ordered him to
be arrested at once.
“Have you learned anything from Madame Alphonse?” I asked the public
prosecutor, when my deposition had been written and signed.
“That unhappy young lady has gone out of her mind,” he said to me with
a sad smile. “Out of her mind! Quite out! Here’s her story.
“She had been in bed, she says, for some minutes, with the curtains
drawn, when the door of her room opened, and some one came in. Madame
Alphonse was then on the far side of the bed, with her face to the
wall. She did not move, being sure that it was her husband. An instant
later the bed groaned as if it was loaded with an enormous weight. She
was very much afraid, but did not dare to turn her head. Five minutes,
ten minutes perhaps--she could form no notion of the time--passed thus.
Then she made an involuntary movement, or rather the person who was
in the bed made one, and she felt the contact of something as cold as
ice, these are the expressions she used. She buried herself in the far
side of the bed, trembling in every limb. Shortly afterwards the door
opened a second time, and some one entered, who said, ‛Good evening, my
little wife.’ Very soon after, the curtains were drawn aside. She heard
a smothered cry. The person who was in the bed beside her sat up, and
seemed to stretch forward his arms. She turned her head then ... and
saw, she declares, her husband on his knees at the bed-side, his head
level with the pillow, in the arms of a sort of greenish giant who was
hugging him with violence. She says, and she has repeated it to me a
score of times, poor woman! ... she says that she recognized ... can
you guess? The bronze Venus, M. de Peyrehorade’s statue.... Since it
came into the neighbourhood, every one dreams about it. But to resume
the unhappy madwoman’s story. At that sight she lost consciousness, and
probably she had already lost her reason some time before. She is quite
unable to say how long she continued in her faint. When she came to
herself, she still saw the phantom, or the statue, as she always calls
it, motionless, its legs and the lower part of its body in the bed,
its bust and arms stretched over, and in its arms her husband, without
movement. A cock crew. The statue then got out of the bed, let fall the
corpse, and went out. Madame Alphonse tore at the bell-pull, and you
know the rest.”
They brought up the Spaniard; he was calm, and defended himself with
much coolness and presence of mind. To be sure, he did not deny the
saying which I had heard; but he explained that all he meant by it was
that, next day, when he was rested, he would have won a tennis-match
from his conqueror. I recollect that he added:
“When an Aragonese is affronted, he does not wait till the next day to
avenge himself. If I had thought that M. Alphonse meant to insult me, I
would have given him one in the belly with my knife on the spot.”
They compared his shoes with the footprints in the garden; his shoes
were very much larger.
Finally the innkeeper, with whom the man had lodged, affirmed that he
had spent the whole night rubbing and dosing one of his mules that was
sick.
Moreover, this Aragonese was a man of good reputation, well known in
the neighbourhood, to which he came every year on his business. So
they released him and made their excuses to him.
I forgot the deposition of a servant, who had been the last to see M.
Alphonse in life. It was at the moment when he was about to go upstairs
to his wife, and, calling the servant, he had asked him with an air
of anxiety, if he knew where I was. The servant answered him that he
had seen nothing of me. M. Alphonse then heaved a sigh, and remained
speechless for more than a minute, then he said, “_Well, I declare, the
devil must have taken him away too!_”
I asked this man whether M. Alphonse had his diamond ring when he spoke
to him. The servant hesitated about answering; at last he said that he
thought no, but that he really had not paid any attention.
“If he had had the ring on his finger,” he added, correcting himself,
“I should certainly have noticed it, for I thought that he had given it
to Madame Alphonse.”
While questioning this man I felt something of the superstitious terror
which Madame Alphonse’s deposition had spread all through the house.
The public prosecutor looked at me with a smile, and I took good care
not to say anything more.
Some hours after M. Alphonse’s funeral, I made ready to leave Ille. M.
de Peyrehorade’s carriage was to take me to Perpignan. In spite of his
weak condition, the poor old man insisted on accompanying me to the
gate of his garden. We crossed it in silence, he dragging himself along
painfully, leaning on my arm. At the moment of our parting, I cast a
last look on the Venus. I could well foresee that my host, although he
did not share the terror and hatred with which it inspired a part of
his family, would wish to rid himself of an object which would remind
him unceasingly of a fearful calamity. My intention was to get him to
promise to place it in a museum. I was hesitating about how to broach
the matter, when M. de Peyrehorade mechanically turned his head in
the direction in which he saw me looking fixedly. He caught sight of
the statue, and at once burst into tears. I embraced him, and, without
venturing to say a single word to him, got into the carriage.
Since my departure I have not learned that the slightest fresh light
has been shed upon this mysterious catastrophe.
M. de Peyrehorade died some months after his son. By his will he
bequeathed to me his manuscripts, which I shall perhaps publish some
day. I have found no trace whatever among them of the paper dealing
with the inscriptions on the Venus.
_P.S._--My friend M. de P. has just written to me from Perpignan that
the statue no longer exists. After her husband’s death, Madame de
Peyrehorade’s first care was to have it melted down and made into a
bell, and in this new form it is doing duty at the church of Ille. But,
adds M. de P., it would appear that ill luck pursues the owners of that
bronze. Since this bell began to ring at Ille the vines have twice been
frosted.
THE STORY OF A WHITE BLACKBIRD
ALFRED DE MUSSET
I
How glorious, but how distressing a thing it is to be an exceptional
blackbird in this world! I am by no means a fabulous bird, and M. de
Buffon has described me. But, alas! I am extremely rare, and very
difficult to find. Would God I had been utterly undiscoverable!
My father and mother were two good souls, who had lived for a number
of years at the bottom of a secluded old garden in the Marais. Theirs
was an exemplary household. While my mother, squatted in a thick bush,
laid regularly three times a year, and sat on her eggs, dozing, with
patriarchal devotion, my father, still very tidy and very smart despite
his great age, kept pilfering around her all day long, bringing her
fine insects which he held delicately by the tip of the tail, so as
not to disgust his wife, and, when night came, he never failed, if the
weather was fine, to regale her with a song, which rejoiced the whole
neighbourhood. Never a quarrel, never the least cloud, had disturbed
that sweet union.
Scarcely had I come into the world, when my father, for the first time
in his life, began to show bad temper. Although I was as yet only a
dubious grey, he failed to recognize in me either the colour, or the
form of his numerous posterity.
“There’s a dirty child,” he would sometimes say, looking askance at
me; “it looks as if that ragamuffin must go and poke himself into every
mortar-heap and mud-heap he comes across, that he is always so ugly and
bespattered.”
“Eh, dear me, my friend,” answered my mother, always curled into a ball
in an old bowl, of which she had made her nest, “don’t you see that
it’s all you can expect at his age? In your young days, weren’t you a
charming little pickle yourself? Let our blackbirdie grow, and you’ll
see how handsome he’ll be; he’s one of the best I ever laid.”
Although thus taking my side, my mother was under no delusion; she saw
the growth of my fatal plumage, which to her appeared a monstrosity;
but she did as mothers do, who often become partial to their infants
because of the very thing in which they are hardly used by Nature, as
if the fault were their own, or as if they could repel in advance the
injustice of fortune which must strike their children.
When the time of my first moult came, my father turned very pensive
indeed, and considered me attentively. So long as my feathers were
coming out, he continued to treat me kindly enough, and even gave me
some paste when he saw me shivering almost naked in a corner; but as
soon as my poor numbed wings began to get a new covering of down, with
each white feather he saw appear, he flew into such a rage that I was
afraid he’d pluck me for the rest of my days. Alas! I had no mirror;
I knew not the cause of his anger, and I asked myself why the best of
fathers showed himself so barbarous to me.
One day, when a ray of sunshine and my sprouting plumage had, despite
me, stirred my heart to joy, as I was fluttering about in an alley, I
started, unfortunately for me, to sing. The first note that my father
heard, he sprang up in the air like a rocket.
“What is that I hear there?” he exclaimed. “Is that how a blackbird
whistles? Is that how I whistle? Is that whistling?”
And, alighting beside my mother with a most terrible countenance:
“Wretch!” he said, “who has been laying in your nest?”
At these words my mother darted, deeply insulted, out of her bowl, not
without doing some damage to one foot; she tried to speak, but her sobs
choked her; she fell on the ground half swooning. I saw her at the
point of death; terrified and trembling with fear I threw myself at my
father’s knees.
“O my father!” I said to him, “though I whistle wrong, and though I am
wrongly clad, don’t let my mother be punished for it! Is it her fault
if Nature has denied me a voice like yours? Is it her fault if I have
not your handsome yellow beak and your fine black French coat, which
make you look like a churchwarden swallowing an omelette? If Heaven has
made a monster of me, and if some one must be punished for it, let me
at least be the only one to suffer!”
“That is not the question,” said my father. “What is the meaning of the
absurd way in which you have just now presumed to whistle? Who taught
you to whistle like that, contrary to all custom and all rule?”
“Alas! sir,” I answered humbly, “I whistled as I could, because I felt
merry that it was fine weather, and perhaps because I had eaten too
many flies.”
“We don’t whistle like that in my family,” retorted my father, beside
himself. “For centuries we have whistled from father to son, and, when
I make my voice heard in the night, let me tell you that there is an
old gentleman here on the first floor and a little work-girl in the
attic, who open their windows to listen to me. Is it not enough to have
before my eyes the frightful colour of your ridiculous feathers, which
give you a powdered look, like a clown at a fair? If I were not the
most peaceable of blackbirds, I would have plucked you naked a hundred
times before now, for all the world like a barn-door fowl ready for the
spit.”
“Why then!” I exclaimed, revolted at my father’s injustice, “if that
is the case, sir, don’t let that stand in your way! I will take myself
off from your presence, I will spare your eyes the sight of this
unfortunate white tail by which you drag me about all day long. I will
depart, sir, I will flee; plenty other children will console your old
age, since my mother lays three times a year; I will go far from you to
hide my misery, and perhaps,” I added sobbing, “perhaps I shall find,
in some neighbour’s kitchen-garden, or on the gutters, some earth-worms
or some spiders to maintain my sad existence.”
“As you will,” replied my father, far from being softened at this
speech; “let me never see you again! You are not my son; you are not a
blackbird.”
“And what am I then, sir, if you please?”
“I have no idea, but you are not a blackbird.”
After these crushing words, my father went off with slow steps. My
mother rose sadly, and went limping to have her cry out in her bowl.
As for me, confounded and overcome, I took my flight as best I could,
and I went, as I had announced, to perch myself on the gutter of a
neighbouring house.