Cornelius Hoogworst, one of the richest merchants in Ghent, having drawn
upon himself the enmity of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, found refuge
and protection at the court of Louis XI. The king was conscious of the
advantages he could gain from a man connected with all the principal
commercial houses of Flanders, Venice, and the Levant; he naturalized,
ennobled, and flattered Maitre Cornelius; all of which was rarely done
by Louis XI. The monarch pleased the Fleming as much as the Fleming
pleased the monarch. Wily, distrustful, and miserly; equally politic,
equally learned; superior, both of them, to their epoch; understanding
each other marvellously; they discarded and resumed with equal facility,
the one his conscience, the other his religion; they loved the same
Virgin, one by conviction, the other by policy; in short, if we may
believe the jealous tales of Olivier de Daim and Tristan, the king went
to the house of the Fleming for those diversions with which King
Louis XI. diverted himself. History has taken care to transmit to our
knowledge the licentious tastes of a monarch who was not averse to
debauchery. The old Fleming found, no doubt, both pleasure and profit in
lending himself to the capricious pleasures of his royal client.
Cornelius had now lived nine years in the city of Tours. During those
years extraordinary events had happened in his house, which had made
him the object of general execration. On his first arrival, he had spent
considerable sums in order to put the treasures he brought with him in
safety. The strange inventions made for him secretly by the locksmiths
of the town, the curious precautions taken in bringing those locksmiths
to his house in a way to compel their silence, were long the subject
of countless tales which enlivened the evening gatherings of the city.
These singular artifices on the part of the old man made every
one suppose him the possessor of Oriental riches. Consequently the
_narrators_ of that region--the home of the tale in France--built rooms
full of gold and precious tones in the Fleming’s house, not omitting to
attribute all this fabulous wealth to compacts with Magic.
Maitre Cornelius had brought with him from Ghent two Flemish valets, an
old woman, and a young apprentice; the latter, a youth with a gentle,
pleasing face, served him as secretary, cashier, factotum, and
courier. During the first year of his settlement in Tours, a robbery of
considerable amount took place in his house, and judicial inquiry showed
that the crime must have been committed by one of its inmates. The old
miser had his two valets and the secretary put in prison. The young man
was feeble and he died under the sufferings of the “question” protesting
his innocence. The valets confessed the crime to escape torture; but
when the judge required them to say where the stolen property could
be found, they kept silence, were again put to the torture, judged,
condemned, and hanged. On their way to the scaffold they declared
themselves innocent, according to the custom of all persons about to be
executed.
The city of Tours talked much of this singular affair; but the
criminals were Flemish, and the interest felt in their unhappy fate
soon evaporated. In those days wars and seditions furnished endless
excitements, and the drama of each day eclipsed that of the night
before. More grieved by the loss he had met with than by the death of
his three servants, Maitre Cornelius lived alone in his house with the
old Flemish woman, his sister. He obtained permission from the king to
use state couriers for his private affairs, sold his mules to a muleteer
of the neighborhood, and lived from that moment in the deepest solitude,
seeing no one but the king, doing his business by means of Jews, who,
shrewd calculators, served him well in order to gain his all-powerful
protection.
Some time after this affair, the king himself procured for his old
“torconnier” a young orphan in whom he took an interest. Louis XI.
called Maitre Cornelius familiarly by that obsolete term, which, under
the reign of Saint-Louis, meant a usurer, a collector of imposts, a man
who pressed others by violent means. The epithet, “tortionnaire,” which
remains to this day in our legal phraseology, explains the old word
torconnier, which we often find spelt “tortionneur.” The poor young
orphan devoted himself carefully to the affairs of the old Fleming,
pleased him much, and was soon high in his good graces. During a
winter’s night, certain diamonds deposited with Maitre Cornelius by the
King of England as security for a sum of a hundred thousand crowns were
stolen, and suspicion, of course, fell on the orphan. Louis XI. was all
the more severe because he had answered for the youth’s fidelity.
After a very brief and summary examination by the grand provost, the
unfortunate secretary was hanged. After that no one dared for a long
time to learn the arts of banking and exchange from Maitre Cornelius.
In course of time, however, two young men of the town, Touraineans,--men
of honor, and eager to make their fortunes,--took service with the
silversmith. Robberies coincided with the admission of the two young men
into the house. The circumstances of these crimes, the manner in which
they were perpetrated, showed plainly that the robbers had secret
communication with its inmates. Become by this time more than ever
suspicious and vindictive, the old Fleming laid the matter before
Louis XI., who placed it in the hands of his grand provost. A trial was
promptly had and promptly ended. The inhabitants of Tours blamed Tristan
l’Hermite secretly for unseemly haste. Guilty or not guilty, the
young Touraineans were looked upon as victims, and Cornelius as an
executioner. The two families thus thrown into mourning were much
respected; their complaints obtained a hearing, and little by little it
came to be believed that all the victims whom the king’s silversmith had
sent to the scaffold were innocent. Some persons declared that the cruel
miser imitated the king, and sought to put terror and gibbets between
himself and his fellow-men; others said that he had never been robbed
at all,--that these melancholy executions were the result of cool
calculations, and that their real object was to relieve him of all fear
for his treasure.
The first effect of these rumors was to isolate Maitre Cornelius. The
Touraineans treated him like a leper, called him the “tortionnaire,” and
named his house Malemaison. If the Fleming had found strangers to the
town bold enough to enter it, the inhabitants would have warned them
against doing so. The most favorable opinion of Maitre Cornelius was
that of persons who thought him merely baneful. Some he inspired with
instinctive terror; others he impressed with the deep respect that most
men feel for limitless power and money, while to a few he certainly
possessed the attraction of mystery. His way of life, his countenance,
and the favor of the king, justified all the tales of which he had now
become the subject.
Cornelius travelled much in foreign lands after the death of his
persecutor, the Duke of Burgundy; and during his absence the king caused
his premises to be guarded by a detachment of his own Scottish guard.
Such royal solicitude made the courtiers believe that the old miser had
bequeathed his property to Louis XI. When at home, the torconnier went
out but little; but the lords of the court paid him frequent visits.
He lent them money rather liberally, though capricious in his manner of
doing so. On certain days he refused to give them a penny; the next day
he would offer them large sums,--always at high interest and on good
security. A good Catholic, he went regularly to the services, always
attending the earliest mass at Saint-Martin; and as he had purchased
there, as elsewhere, a chapel in perpetuity, he was separated even
in church from other Christians. A popular proverb of that day, long
remembered in Tours, was the saying: “You passed in front of the
Fleming; ill-luck will happen to you.” Passing in front of the Fleming
explained all sudden pains and evils, involuntary sadness, ill-turns of
fortune among the Touraineans. Even at court most persons attributed
to Cornelius that fatal influence which Italian, Spanish, and Asiatic
superstition has called the “evil eye.” Without the terrible power
of Louis XI., which was stretched like a mantle over that house,
the populace, on the slightest opportunity, would have demolished La
Malemaison, that “evil house” in the rue du Murier. And yet Cornelius
had been the first to plant mulberries in Tours, and the Touraineans at
that time regarded him as their good genius. Who shall reckon on popular
favor!
A few seigneurs having met Maitre Cornelius on his journeys out of
France were surprised at his friendliness and good-humor. At Tours he
was gloomy and absorbed, yet always he returned there. Some inexplicable
power brought him back to his dismal house in the rue du Murier. Like a
snail, whose life is so firmly attached to its shell, he admitted to
the king that he was never at ease except under the bolts and behind the
vermiculated stones of his little bastille; yet he knew very well that
whenever Louis XI. died, the place would be the most dangerous spot on
earth for him.
“The devil is amusing himself at the expense of our crony, the
torconnier,” said Louis XI. to his barber, a few days before the
festival of All-Saints. “He says he has been robbed again, but he can’t
hang anybody this time unless he hangs himself. The old vagabond came
and asked me if, by chance, I had carried off a string of rubies he
wanted to sell me. ‘Pasques-Dieu! I don’t steal what I can take,’ I said
to him.”
“Was he frightened?” asked the barber.
“Misers are afraid of only one thing,” replied the king. “My crony the
torconnier knows very well that I shall not plunder him unless for good
reason; otherwise I should be unjust, and I have never done anything but
what is just and necessary.”
“And yet that old brigand overcharges you,” said the barber.
“You wish he did, don’t you?” replied the king, with the malicious look
at his barber.
“Ventre-Mahom, sire, the inheritance would be a fine one between you and
the devil!”
“There, there!” said the king, “don’t put bad ideas into my head.
My crony is a more faithful man than those whose fortunes I have
made--perhaps because he owes me nothing.”
For the last two years Maitre Cornelius had lived entirely alone with
his aged sister, who was thought a witch. A tailor in the neighborhood
declared that he had often seen her at night, on the roof of the house,
waiting for the hour of the witches’ sabbath. This fact seemed the more
extraordinary because it was known to be the miser’s custom to lock up
his sister at night in a bedroom with iron-barred windows.
As he grew older, Cornelius, constantly robbed, and always fearful of
being duped by men, came to hate mankind, with the one exception of the
king, whom he greatly respected. He fell into extreme misanthropy, but,
like most misers, his passion for gold, the assimilation, as it were,
of that metal with his own substance, became closer and closer, and age
intensified it. His sister herself excited his suspicions, though she
was perhaps more miserly, more rapacious than her brother whom she
actually surpassed in penurious inventions. Their daily existence had
something mysterious and problematical about it. The old woman rarely
took bread from the baker; she appeared so seldom in the market, that
the least credulous of the townspeople ended by attributing to these
strange beings the knowledge of some secret for the maintenance of life.
Those who dabbled in alchemy declared that Maitre Cornelius had the
power of making gold. Men of science averred that he had found the
Universal Panacea. According to many of the country-people to whom the
townsfolk talked of him, Cornelius was a chimerical being, and many of
them came into the town to look at his house out of mere curiosity.
The young seigneur whom we left in front of that house looked about him,
first at the hotel de Poitiers, the home of his mistress, and then at
the evil house. The moonbeams were creeping round their angles, and
tinting with a mixture of light and shade the hollows and reliefs of the
carvings. The caprices of this white light gave a sinister expression
to both edifices; it seemed as if Nature herself encouraged the
superstitions that hung about the miser’s dwelling. The young man
called to mind the many traditions which made Cornelius a personage both
curious and formidable. Though quite decided through the violence of his
love to enter that house, and stay there long enough to accomplish his
design, he hesitated to take the final step, all the while aware that he
should certainly take it. But where is the man who, in a crisis of his
life, does not willingly listen to presentiments as he hangs above the
precipice? A lover worthy of being loved, the young man feared to die
before he had been received for love’s sake by the countess.
This mental deliberation was so painfully interesting that he did not
feel the cold wind as it whistled round the corner of the building, and
chilled his legs. On entering that house, he must lay aside his name, as
already he had laid aside the handsome garments of nobility. In case of
mishap, he could not claim the privileges of his rank nor the protection
of his friends without bringing hopeless ruin on the Comtesse de
Saint-Vallier. If her husband suspected the nocturnal visit of a lover,
he was capable of roasting her alive in an iron cage, or of killing her
by degrees in the dungeons of a fortified castle. Looking down at the
shabby clothing in which he had disguised himself, the young nobleman
felt ashamed. His black leather belt, his stout shoes, his ribbed socks,
his linsey-woolsey breeches, and his gray woollen doublet made him
look like the clerk of some poverty-stricken justice. To a noble of
the fifteenth century it was like death itself to play the part of a
beggarly burgher, and renounce the privileges of his rank. But--to climb
the roof of the house where his mistress wept; to descend the chimney,
or creep along from gutter to gutter to the window of her room; to risk
his life to kneel beside her on a silken cushion before a glowing fire,
during the sleep of a dangerous husband, whose snores would double
their joy; to defy both heaven and earth in snatching the boldest of
all kisses; to say no word that would not lead to death or at least
to sanguinary combat if overheard,--all these voluptuous images and
romantic dangers decided the young man. However slight might be the
guerdon of his enterprise, could he only kiss once more the hand of his
lady, he still resolved to venture all, impelled by the chivalrous and
passionate spirit of those days. He never supposed for a moment that
the countess would refuse him the soft happiness of love in the midst of
such mortal danger. The adventure was too perilous, too impossible not
to be attempted and carried out.
Suddenly all the bells in the town rang out the curfew,--a custom fallen
elsewhere into desuetude, but still observed in the provinces, where
venerable habits are abolished slowly. Though the lights were not
put out, the watchmen of each quarter stretched the chains across the
streets. Many doors were locked; the steps of a few belated burghers,
attended by their servants, armed to the teeth and bearing lanterns,
echoed in the distance. Soon the town, garroted as it were, seemed to be
asleep, and safe from robbers and evil-doers, except through the roofs.
In those days the roofs of houses were much frequented after dark. The
streets were so narrow in the provincial towns, and even in Paris, that
robbers could jump from the roofs on one side to those on the other.
This perilous occupation was long the amusement of King Charles IX. in
his youth, if we may believe the memoirs of his day.
Fearing to present himself too late to the old silversmith, the young
nobleman now went up to the door of the Malemaison intending to knock,
when, on looking at it, his attention was excited by a sort of vision,
which the writers of those days would have called “cornue,”--perhaps
with reference to horns and hoofs. He rubbed his eyes to clear his
sight, and a thousand diverse sentiments passed through his mind at the
spectacle before him. On each side of the door was a face framed in
a species of loophole. At first he took these two faces for grotesque
masks carved in stone, so angular, distorted, projecting, motionless,
discolored were they; but the cold air and the moonlight presently
enabled him to distinguish the faint white mist which living breath sent
from two purplish noses; then he saw in each hollow face, beneath the
shadow of the eyebrows, two eyes of porcelain blue casting clear fire,
like those of a wolf crouching in the brushwood as it hears the baying
of the hounds. The uneasy gleam of those eyes was turned on him so
fixedly that, after receiving it for fully a minute, during which he
examined the singular sight, he felt like a bird at which a setter
points; a feverish tumult rose in his soul, but he quickly repressed
it. The two faces, strained and suspicious, were doubtless those of
Cornelius and his sister.
The young man feigned to be looking about him to see where he was,
and whether this were the house named on a card which he drew from his
pocket and pretended to read in the moonlight; then he walked straight
to the door and struck three blows upon it, which echoed within the
house as if it were the entrance to a cave. A faint light crept beneath
the threshold, and an eye appeared at a small and very strong iron
grating.
“Who is there?”
“A friend, sent by Oosterlinck, of Brussels.”
“What do you want?”
“To enter.”
“Your name?”
“Philippe Goulenoire.”
“Have you brought credentials?”
“Here they are.”
“Pass them through the box.”
“Where is it?”
“To your left.”
Philippe Goulenoire put the letter through the slit of an iron box above
which was a loophole.
“The devil!” thought he, “plainly the king comes here, as they say he
does; he couldn’t take more precautions at Plessis.”
He waited for more than a quarter of an hour in the street. After that
lapse of time, he heard Cornelius saying to his sister, “Close the traps
of the door.”
A clinking of chains resounded from within. Philippe heard the bolts
run, the locks creak, and presently a small low door, iron-bound, opened
to the slightest distance through which a man could pass. At the risk of
tearing off his clothing, Philippe squeezed himself rather than walked
into La Malemaison. A toothless old woman with a hatchet face, the
eyebrows projecting like the handles of a cauldron, the nose and chin
so near together that a nut could scarcely pass between them,--a pallid,
haggard creature, her hollow temples composed apparently of only bones
and nerves,--guided the “soi-disant” foreigner silently into a lower
room, while Cornelius followed prudently behind him.
“Sit there,” she said to Philippe, showing him a three-legged stool
placed at the corner of a carved stone fireplace, where there was no
fire.
On the other side of the chimney-piece was a walnut table with
twisted legs, on which was an egg in a plate and ten or a dozen little
bread-sops, hard and dry and cut with studied parsimony. Two stools
placed beside the table, on one of which the old woman sat down, showed
that the miserly pair were eating their suppers. Cornelius went to the
door and pushed two iron shutters into their place, closing, no doubt,
the loopholes through which they had been gazing into the street; then
he returned to his seat. Philippe Goulenoire (so called) next beheld the
brother and sister dipping their sops into the egg in turn, and with
the utmost gravity and the same precision with which soldiers dip their
spoons in regular rotation into the mess-pot. This performance was done
in silence. But as he ate, Cornelius examined the false apprentice with
as much care and scrutiny as if he were weighing an old coin.
Philippe, feeling that an icy mantle had descended on his shoulders, was
tempted to look about him; but, with the circumspection dictated by all
amorous enterprises, he was careful not to glance, even furtively, at
the walls; for he fully understood that if Cornelius detected him,
he would not allow so inquisitive a person to remain in his house. He
contented himself, therefore, by looking first at the egg and then at
the old woman, occasionally contemplating his future master.
Louis XI.’s silversmith resembled that monarch. He had even acquired the
same gestures, as often happens where persons dwell together in a sort
of intimacy. The thick eyebrows of the Fleming almost covered his eyes;
but by raising them a little he could flash out a lucid, penetrating,
powerful glance, the glance of men habituated to silence, and to
whom the phenomenon of the concentration of inward forces has become
familiar. His thin lips, vertically wrinkled, gave him an air of
indescribable craftiness. The lower part of his face bore a vague
resemblance to the muzzle of a fox, but his lofty, projecting forehead,
with many lines, showed great and splendid qualities and a nobility
of soul, the springs of which had been lowered by experience until the
cruel teachings of life had driven it back into the farthest recesses of
this most singular human being. He was certainly not an ordinary
miser; and his passion covered, no doubt, extreme enjoyments and secret
conceptions.
“What is the present rate of Venetian sequins?” he said abruptly to his
future apprentice.
“Three-quarters at Brussels; one in Ghent.”
“What is the freight on the Scheldt?”
“Three sous parisis.”
“Any news at Ghent?”
“The brother of Lieven d’Herde is ruined.”
“Ah!”
After giving vent to that exclamation, the old man covered his knee with
the skirt of his dalmatian, a species of robe made of black velvet, open
in front, with large sleeves and no collar, the sumptuous material being
defaced and shiny. These remains of a magnificent costume, formerly worn
by him as president of the tribunal of the Parchons, functions which had
won him the enmity of the Duke of Burgundy, was now a mere rag.
Philippe was not cold; he perspired in his harness, dreading further
questions. Until then the brief information obtained that morning from
a Jew whose life he had formerly saved, had sufficed him, thanks to his
good memory and the perfect knowledge the Jew possessed of the manners
and habits of Maitre Cornelius. But the young man who, in the first
flush of his enterprise, had feared nothing was beginning to perceive
the difficulties it presented. The solemn gravity of the terrible
Fleming reacted upon him. He felt himself under lock and key, and
remembered how the grand provost Tristan and his rope were at the orders
of Maitre Cornelius.
“Have you supped?” asked the silversmith, in a tone which signified,
“You are not to sup.”
The old maid trembled in spite of her brother’s tone; she looked at the
new inmate as if to gauge the capacity of the stomach she might have to
fill, and said with a specious smile:--
“You have not stolen your name; your hair and moustache are as black as
the devil’s tail.”
“I have supped,” he said.
“Well then,” replied the miser, “you can come back and see me to-morrow.
I have done without an apprentice for some years. Besides, I wish to
sleep upon the matter.”
“Hey! by Saint-Bavon, monsieur, I am a Fleming; I don’t know a soul
in this place; the chains are up in the streets, and I shall be put in
prison. However,” he added, frightened at the eagerness he was showing
in his words, “if it is your good pleasure, of course I will go.”
The oath seemed to affect the old man singularly.
“Come, come, by Saint-Bavon indeed, you shall sleep here.”
“But--” said his sister, alarmed.
“Silence,” replied Cornelius. “In his letter Oosterlinck tells me he
will answer for this young man. You know,” he whispered in his sister’s
ear, “we have a hundred thousand francs belonging to Oosterlinck? That’s
a hostage, hey!”
“And suppose he steals those Bavarian jewels? Tiens, he looks more like
a thief than a Fleming.”
“Hush!” exclaimed the old man, listening attentively to some sound.
Both misers listened. A moment after the “Hush!” uttered by Cornelius, a
noise produced by the steps of several men echoed in the distance on the
other side of the moat of the town.
“It is the Plessis guard on their rounds,” said the sister.
“Give me the key of the apprentice’s room,” said Cornelius.
The old woman made a gesture as if to take the lamp.
“Do you mean to leave us alone, without light?” cried Cornelius, in a
meaning tone of voice. “At your age can’t you see in the dark? It isn’t
difficult to find a key.”
The sister understood the meaning hidden beneath these words and left
the room. Looking at this singular creature as she walked towards the
door, Philippe Goulenoire was able to hide from Cornelius the glance
which he hastily cast about the room. It was wainscoted in oak to the
chair-strip, and the walls above were hung with yellow leather stamped
with black arabesques; but what struck the young man most was a
match-lock pistol with its formidable trigger. This new and terrible
weapon lay close to Cornelius.
“How do you expect to earn your living with me?” said the latter.
“I have but little money,” replied Philippe, “but I know good tricks in
business. If you will pay me a sou on every mark I earn for you, that
will satisfy me.”
“A sou! a sou!” echoed the miser; “why, that’s a good deal!”
At this moment the old sibyl returned with the key.
“Come,” said Cornelius to Philippe.
The pair went out beneath the portico and mounted a spiral stone
staircase, the round well of which rose through a high turret, beside
the hall in which they had been sitting. At the first floor up the young
man paused.
“No, no,” said Cornelius. “The devil! this nook is the place where the
king takes his ease.”
The architect had constructed the room given to the apprentice under the
pointed roof of the tower in which the staircase wound. It was a little
room, all of stone, cold and without ornament of any kind. The tower
stood in the middle of the facade on the courtyard, which, like the
courtyards of all provincial houses, was narrow and dark. At the farther
end, through an iron railing, could be seen a wretched garden in which
nothing grew but the mulberries which Cornelius had introduced. The
young nobleman took note of all this through the loopholes on the spiral
staircase, the moon casting, fortunately, a brilliant light. A cot, a
stool, a mismatched pitcher and basin formed the entire furniture of
the room. The light could enter only through square openings, placed at
intervals in the outside wall of the tower, according, no doubt, to the
exterior ornamentation.
“Here is your lodging,” said Cornelius; “it is plain and solid and
contains all that is needed for sleep. Good night! Do not leave this
room as _the others_ did.”
After giving his apprentice a last look full of many meanings, Cornelius
double-locked the door, took away the key and descended the staircase,
leaving the young nobleman as much befooled as a bell-founder when on
opening his mould he finds nothing. Alone, without light, seated on a
stool, in a little garret from which so many of his predecessors had
gone to the scaffold, the young fellow felt like a wild beast caught in
a trap. He jumped upon the stool and raised himself to his full height
in order to reach one of the little openings through which a faint light
shone. Thence he saw the Loire, the beautiful slopes of Saint-Cyr,
the gloomy marvels of Plessis, where lights were gleaming in the deep
recesses of a few windows. Far in the distance lay the beautiful meadows
of Touraine and the silvery stream of her river. Every point of this
lovely nature had, at that moment, a mysterious grace; the windows, the
waters, the roofs of the houses shone like diamonds in the trembling
light of the moon. The soul of the young seigneur could not repress a
sad and tender emotion.
“Suppose it is my last farewell!” he said to himself.
He stood there, feeling already the terrible emotions his adventure
offered him, and yielding to the fears of a prisoner who, nevertheless,
retains some glimmer of hope. His mistress illumined each difficulty. To
him she was no longer a woman, but a supernatural being seen through
the incense of his desires. A feeble cry, which he fancied came from the
hotel de Poitiers, restored him to himself and to a sense of his true
situation. Throwing himself on his pallet to reflect on his course, he
heard a slight movement which echoed faintly from the spiral staircase.
He listened attentively, and the whispered words, “He has gone to bed,”
said by the old woman, reached his ear. By an accident unknown probably
to the architect, the slightest noise on the staircase sounded in the
room of the apprentices, so that Philippe did not lose a single movement
of the miser and his sister who were watching him. He undressed, lay
down, pretended to sleep, and employed the time during which the pair
remained on the staircase, in seeking means to get from his prison to
the hotel de Poitiers.
About ten o’clock Cornelius and his sister, convinced that their new
inmate was sleeping, retired to their rooms. The young man studied
carefully the sounds they made in doing so, and thought he could
recognize the position of their apartments; they must, he believed,
occupy the whole second floor. Like all the houses of that period, this
floor was next below the roof, from which its windows projected, adorned
with spandrel tops that were richly sculptured. The roof itself was
edged with a sort of balustrade, concealing the gutters for the rain
water which gargoyles in the form of crocodile’s heads discharged
into the street. The young seigneur, after studying this topography as
carefully as a cat, believed he could make his way from the tower to the
roof, and thence to Madame de Vallier’s by the gutters and the help of a
gargoyle. But he did not count on the narrowness of the loopholes of the
tower; it was impossible to pass through them. He then resolved to get
out upon the roof of the house through the window of the staircase on
the second floor. To accomplish this daring project he must leave his
room, and Cornelius had carried off the key.
By way of precaution, the young man had brought with him, concealed
under his clothes, one of those poignards formerly used to give the
“coup de grace” in a duel when the vanquished adversary begged the
victor to despatch him. This horrible weapon had on one side a blade
sharpened like a razor, and on the other a blade that was toothed like
a saw, but toothed in the reverse direction from that by which it would
enter the body. The young man determined to use this latter blade to saw
through the wood around the lock. Happily for him the staple of the lock
was put on to the outside of the door by four stout screws. By the help
of his dagger he managed, not without great difficulty, to unscrew and
remove it altogether, carefully laying it aside and the four screws with
it. By midnight he was free, and he went down the stairs without his
shoes to reconnoitre the localities.
He was not a little astonished to find a door wide open which led down a
corridor to several chambers, at the end of which corridor was a window
opening on a depression caused by the junction of the roofs of the hotel
de Poitiers and that of the Malemaison which met there. Nothing could
express his joy, unless it be the vow which he instantly made to the
Blessed Virgin to found a mass in her honor in the celebrated parish
church of the Escrignoles at Tours. After examining the tall broad
chimneys of the hotel de Poitiers he returned upon his steps to fetch
his dagger, when to his horror, he beheld a vivid light on the staircase
and saw Maitre Cornelius himself in his dalmatian, carrying a lamp, his
eyes open to their fullest extent and fixed upon the corridor, at the
entrance of which he stood like a spectre.
“If I open the window and jump upon the roofs, he will hear me,” thought
the young man.
The terrible old miser advanced, like the hour of death to a criminal.
In this extremity Philippe, instigated by love, recovered his presence
of mind; he slipped into a doorway, pressing himself back into the angle
of it, and awaited the old man. When Cornelius, holding his lamp in
advance of him, came into line with the current of air which the
young man could send from his lungs, the lamp was blown out. Cornelius
muttered vague words and swore a Dutch oath; but he turned and retraced
his steps. The young man then rushed to his room, caught up his dagger
and returned to the blessed window, opened it softly and jumped upon the
roof.
Once at liberty under the open sky, he felt weak, so happy was he.
Perhaps the extreme agitation of his danger of the boldness of the
enterprise caused his emotion; victory is often as perilous as battle.
He leaned against the balustrade, quivering with joy and saying to
himself:--
“By which chimney can I get to her?”
He looked at them all. With the instinct given by love, he went to all
and felt them to discover in which there had been a fire. Having made
up his mind on that point, the daring young fellow stuck his dagger
securely in a joint between two stones, fastened a silken ladder to it,
threw the ladder down the chimney and risked himself upon it, trusting
to his good blade, and to the chance of not having mistaken his
mistress’s room. He knew not whether Saint-Vallier was asleep or awake,
but one thing he was resolved upon, he would hold the countess in his
arms if it cost the life of two men.
Presently his feet gently touched the warm embers; he bent more gently
still and saw the countess seated in an armchair; and she saw him. Pale
with joy and palpitating, the timid creature showed him, by the light of
the lamp, Saint-Vallier lying in a bed about ten feet from her. We may
well believe their burning silent kisses echoed only in their hearts.