“My poor niece became insane,” continued the physician, after a few
moment’s silence. “Ah! monsieur,” he said, seizing the marquis’s hand,
“life has been awful indeed for that poor little woman, so young,
so delicate! After being, by dreadful fatality, separated from the
grenadier, whose name was Fleuriot, she was dragged about for two years
at the heels of the army, the plaything of a crowd of wretches. She
was often, they tell me, barefooted, and scarcely clothed; for months
together, she had no care, no food but what she could pick up; sometimes
kept in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal, God alone knows
the horrors that poor unfortunate creature has survived. She was
locked up in a madhouse, in a little town in Germany, at the time
her relatives, thinking her dead, divided her property. In 1816, the
grenadier Fleuriot was at an inn in Strasburg, where she went after
making her escape from the madhouse. Several peasants told the grenadier
that she had lived for a whole month in the forest, where they had
tracked her in vain, trying to catch her, but she had always escaped
them. I was then staying a few miles from Strasburg. Hearing much talk
of a wild woman caught in the woods, I felt a desire to ascertain the
truth of the ridiculous stories which were current about her. What were
my feelings on beholding my own niece! Fleuriot told me all he knew of
her dreadful history. I took the poor man with my niece back to my home
in Auvergne, where, unfortunately, I lost him some months later. He had
some slight control over Madame de Vandieres; he alone could induce her
to wear clothing. ‘Adieu,’ that word, which is her only language, she
seldom uttered at that time. Fleuriot had endeavored to awaken in her a
few ideas, a few memories of the past; but he failed; all that he gained
was to make her say that melancholy word a little oftener. Still, the
grenadier knew how to amuse her and play with her; my hope was in him,
but--”
He was silent for a moment.
“Here,” he continued, “she has found another creature, with whom
she seems to have some strange understanding. It is a poor idiotic
peasant-girl, who, in spite of her ugliness and stupidity, loved a man,
a mason. The mason was willing to marry her, as she had some property.
Poor Genevieve was happy for a year; she dressed in her best to dance
with her lover on Sunday; she comprehended love; in her heart and soul
there was room for that one sentiment. But the mason, Dallot, reflected.
He found a girl with all her senses, and more land than Genevieve,
and he deserted the poor creature. Since then she has lost the little
intellect that love developed in her; she can do nothing but watch the
cows, or help at harvesting. My niece and this poor girl are friends,
apparently by some invisible chain of their common destiny, by
the sentiment in each which has caused their madness. See!” added
Stephanie’s uncle, leading the marquis to a window.
The latter then saw the countess seated on the ground between
Genevieve’s legs. The peasant-girl, armed with a huge horn comb, was
giving her whole attention to the work of disentangling the long black
hair of the poor countess, who was uttering little stifled cries,
expressive of some instinctive sense of pleasure. Monsieur d’Albon
shuddered as he saw the utter abandonment of the body, the careless
animal ease which revealed in the hapless woman a total absence of soul.
“Philippe, Philippe!” he muttered, “the past horrors are nothing!--Is
there no hope?” he asked.
The old physician raised his eyes to heaven.
“Adieu, monsieur,” said the marquis, pressing his hand. “My friend is
expecting me. He will soon come to you.”
“Then it was really she!” cried de Sucy at d’Albon’s first words. “Ah!
I still doubted it,” he added, a few tears falling from his eyes, which
were habitually stern.
“Yes, it is the Comtesse de Vandieres,” replied the marquis.
The colonel rose abruptly from his bed and began to dress.
“Philippe!” cried his friend, “are you mad?”
“I am no longer ill,” replied the colonel, simply. “This news has
quieted my suffering. What pain can I feel when I think of Stephanie? I
am going to the Bons-Hommes, to see her, speak to her, cure her. She is
free. Well, happiness will smile upon us--or Providence is not in
this world. Think you that that poor woman could hear my voice and not
recover reason?”
“She has already seen you and not recognized you,” said his friend,
gently, for he felt the danger of Philippe’s excited hopes, and tried to
cast a salutary doubt upon them.
The colonel quivered; then he smiled, and made a motion of incredulity.
No one dared to oppose his wish, and within a very short time he reached
the old priory.
“Where is she?” he cried, on arriving.
“Hush!” said her uncle, “she is sleeping. See, here she is.”
Philippe then saw the poor insane creature lying on a bench in the sun.
Her head was protected from the heat by a forest of hair which fell in
tangled locks over her face. Her arms hung gracefully to the ground; her
body lay easily posed like that of a doe; her feet were folded under her
without effort; her bosom rose and fell at regular intervals; her skin,
her complexion, had that porcelain whiteness, which we admire so much in
the clear transparent faces of children. Standing motionless beside
her, Genevieve held in her hand a branch which Stephanie had doubtless
climbed a tall poplar to obtain, and the poor idiot was gently waving
it above her sleeping companion, to chase away the flies and cool the
atmosphere.
The peasant-woman gazed at Monsieur Fanjat and the colonel; then, like
an animal which recognizes its master, she turned her head slowly to
the countess, and continued to watch her, without giving any sign
of surprise or intelligence. The air was stifling; the stone bench
glittered in the sunlight; the meadow exhaled to heaven those impish
vapors which dance and dart above the herbage like silvery dust; but
Genevieve seemed not to feel this all-consuming heat.
The colonel pressed the hand of the doctor violently in his own. Tears
rolled from his eyes along his manly cheeks, and fell to the earth at
the feet of his Stephanie.
“Monsieur,” said the uncle, “for two years past, my heart is broken day
by day. Soon you will be like me. You may not always weep, but you will
always feel your sorrow.”
The two men understood each other; and again, pressing each other’s
hands, they remained motionless, contemplating the exquisite calmness
which sleep had cast upon that graceful creature. From time to time
she gave a sigh, and that sigh, which had all the semblance of
sensibilities, made the unhappy colonel tremble with hope.
“Alas!” said Monsieur Fanjat, “do not deceive yourself, monsieur; there
is no meaning in her sigh.”
Those who have ever watched for hours with delight the sleep of one
who is tenderly beloved, whose eyes will smile to them at waking, can
understand the sweet yet terrible emotion that shook the colonel’s soul.
To him, this sleep was an illusion; the waking might be death, death in
its most awful form. Suddenly, a little goat jumped in three bounds to
the bench, and smelt at Stephanie, who waked at the sound. She sprang to
her feet, but so lightly that the movement did not frighten the freakish
animal; then she caught sight of Philippe, and darted away, followed by
her four-footed friend, to a hedge of elders; there she uttered the same
little cry like a frightened bird, which the two men had heard near the
other gate. Then she climbed an acacia, and nestling into its tufted
top, she watched the stranger with the inquisitive attention of the
forest birds.
“Adieu, adieu, adieu,” she said, without the soul communicating one
single intelligent inflexion to the word.
It was uttered impassively, as the bird sings his note.
“She does not recognize me!” cried the colonel, in despair. “Stephanie!
it is Philippe, thy Philippe, PHILIPPE!”
And the poor soldier went to the acacia; but when he was a few steps
from it, the countess looked at him, as if defying him, although a
slight expression of fear seemed to flicker in her eye; then, with a
single bound she sprang from the acacia to a laburnum, and thence to a
Norway fir, where she darted from branch to branch with extraordinary
agility.
“Do not pursue her,” said Monsieur Fanjat to the colonel, “or you will
arouse an aversion which might become insurmountable. I will help you to
tame her and make her come to you. Let us sit on this bench. If you pay
no attention to her, she will come of her own accord to examine you.”
“SHE! not to know me! to flee me!” repeated the colonel, seating himself
on a bench with his back to a tree that shaded it, and letting his head
fall upon his breast.
The doctor said nothing. Presently, the countess came gently down the
fir-tree, letting herself swing easily on the branches, as the wind
swayed them. At each branch she stopped to examine the stranger; but
seeing him motionless, she at last sprang to the ground and came slowly
towards him across the grass. When she reached a tree about ten feet
distant, against which she leaned, Monsieur Fanjat said to the colonel
in a low voice,--
“Take out, adroitly, from my right hand pocket some lumps of sugar
you will feel there. Show them to her, and she will come to us. I will
renounce in your favor my sole means of giving her pleasure. With sugar,
which she passionately loves, you will accustom her to approach you, and
to know you again.”
“When she was a woman,” said Philippe, sadly, “she had no taste for
sweet things.”
When the colonel showed her the lump of sugar, holding it between the
thumb and forefinger of his right hand, she again uttered her little
wild cry, and sprang toward him; then she stopped, struggling against
the instinctive fear he caused her; she looked at the sugar and turned
away her head alternately, precisely like a dog whose master forbids him
to touch his food until he has said a letter of the alphabet which he
slowly repeats. At last the animal desire triumphed over fear. Stephanie
darted to Philippe, cautiously putting out her little brown hand to
seize the prize, touched the fingers of her poor lover as she snatched
the sugar, and fled away among the trees. This dreadful scene overcame
the colonel; he burst into tears and rushed into the house.
“Has love less courage than friendship?” Monsieur Fanjat said to him.
“I have some hope, Monsieur le baron. My poor niece was in a far worse
state than that in which you now find her.”
“How was that possible?” cried Philippe.
“She went naked,” replied the doctor.
The colonel made a gesture of horror and turned pale. The doctor saw in
that sudden pallor alarming symptoms; he felt the colonel’s pulse, found
him in a violent fever, and half persuaded, half compelled him to go to
bed. Then he gave him a dose of opium to ensure a calm sleep.
Eight days elapsed, during which Colonel de Sucy struggled against
mortal agony; tears no longer came to his eyes. His soul, often
lacerated, could not harden itself to the sight of Stephanie’s insanity;
but he covenanted, so to speak, with his cruel situation, and found some
assuaging of his sorrow. He had the courage to slowly tame the countess
by bringing her sweetmeats; he took such pains in choosing them, and he
learned so well how to keep the little conquests he sought to make upon
her instincts--that last shred of her intellect--that he ended by making
her much TAMER than she had ever been.
Every morning he went into the park, and if, after searching for her
long, he could not discover on what tree she was swaying, nor the covert
in which she crouched to play with a bird, nor the roof on which she
might have clambered, he would whistle the well-known air of “Partant
pour la Syrie,” to which some tender memory of their love attached.
Instantly, Stephanie would run to him with the lightness of a fawn. She
was now so accustomed to see him, that he frightened her no longer. Soon
she was willing to sit upon his knee, and clasp him closely with her
thin and agile arm. In that attitude--so dear to lovers!--Philippe would
feed her with sugarplums. Then, having eaten those that he gave her, she
would often search his pockets with gestures that had all the mechanical
velocity of a monkey’s motions. When she was very sure there was nothing
more, she looked at Philippe with clear eyes, without ideas, with
recognition. Then she would play with him, trying at times to take off
his boots to see his feet, tearing his gloves, putting on his hat; she
would even let him pass his hands through her hair, and take her in his
arms; she accepted, but without pleasure, his ardent kisses. She would
look at him silently, without emotion, when his tears flowed; but she
always understood his “Partant pour la Syrie,” when he whistled it,
though he never succeeded in teaching her to say her own name Stephanie.
Philippe was sustained in his agonizing enterprise by hope, which never
abandoned him. When, on fine autumn mornings, he found the countess
sitting peacefully on a bench, beneath a poplar now yellowing, the poor
lover would sit at her feet, looking into her eyes as long as she
would let him, hoping ever that the light that was in them would become
intelligent. Sometimes the thought deluded him that he saw those hard
immovable rays softening, vibrating, living, and he cried out,--
“Stephanie! Stephanie! thou hearest me, thou seest me!”
But she listened to that cry as to a noise, the soughing of the wind
in the tree-tops, or the lowing of the cow on the back of which she
climbed. Then the colonel would wring his hands in despair,--despair
that was new each day.
One evening, under a calm sky, amid the silence and peace of that rural
haven, the doctor saw, from a distance, that the colonel was loading his
pistols. The old man felt then that the young man had ceased to hope;
he felt the blood rushing to his heart, and if he conquered the vertigo
that threatened him, it was because he would rather see his niece living
and mad than dead. He hastened up.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“That is for me,” replied the colonel, pointing to a pistol already
loaded, which was lying on the bench; “and this is for her,” he added,
as he forced the wad into the weapon he held.
The countess was lying on the ground beside him, playing with the balls.
“Then you do not know,” said the doctor, coldly, concealing his terror,
“that in her sleep last night she called you: Philippe!”
“She called me!” cried the baron, dropping his pistol, which Stephanie
picked up. He took it from her hastily, caught up the one that was on
the bench, and rushed away.
“Poor darling!” said the doctor, happy in the success of his lie. He
pressed the poor creature to his breast, and continued speaking to
himself: “He would have killed thee, selfish man! because he suffers. He
does not love thee for thyself, my child! But we forgive, do we not? He
is mad, out of his senses, but thou art only senseless. No, God alone
should call thee to Him. We think thee unhappy, we pity thee because
thou canst not share our sorrows, fools that we are!--But,” he said,
sitting down and taking her on his knee, “nothing troubles thee; thy
life is like that of a bird, of a fawn--”
As he spoke she darted upon a young blackbird which was hopping near
them, caught it with a little note of satisfaction, strangled it, looked
at it, dead in her hand, and flung it down at the foot of a tree without
a thought.
The next day, as soon as it was light, the colonel came down into the
gardens, and looked about for Stephanie,--he believed in the coming
happiness. Not finding her he whistled. When his darling came to him, he
took her on his arm; they walked together thus for the first time, and
he led her within a group of trees, the autumn foliage of which
was dropping to the breeze. The colonel sat down. Of her own accord
Stephanie placed herself on his knee. Philippe trembled with joy.
“Love,” he said, kissing her hands passionately, “I am Philippe.”
She looked at him with curiosity.
“Come,” he said, pressing her to him, “dost thou feel my heart? It has
beaten for thee alone. I love thee ever. Philippe is not dead; he is
not dead, thou art on him, in his arms. Thou art MY Stephanie; I am thy
Philippe.”
“Adieu,” she said, “adieu.”
The colonel quivered, for he fancied he saw his own excitement
communicated to his mistress. His heart-rending cry, drawn from him by
despair, that last effort of an eternal love, of a delirious passion,
was successful, the mind of his darling was awaking.
“Ah! Stephanie! Stephanie! we shall yet be happy.”
She gave a cry of satisfaction, and her eyes brightened with a flash of
vague intelligence.
“She knows me!--Stephanie!”
His heart swelled; his eyelids were wet with tears. Then, suddenly, the
countess showed him a bit of sugar she had found in his pocket while
he was speaking to her. He had mistaken for human thought the amount
of reason required for a monkey’s trick. Philippe dropped to the ground
unconscious. Monsieur Fanjat found the countess sitting on the colonel’s
body. She was biting her sugar, and testifying her pleasure by pretty
gestures and affectations with which, had she her reason, she might have
imitated her parrot or her cat.
“Ah! my friend,” said Philippe, when he came to his senses, “I die every
day, every moment! I love too well! I could still bear all, if, in
her madness, she had kept her woman’s nature. But to see her always a
savage, devoid even of modesty, to see her--”
“You want opera madness, do you? something picturesque and pleasing,”
said the doctor, bitterly. “Your love and your devotion yield before
a prejudice. Monsieur, I have deprived myself for your sake of the sad
happiness of watching over my niece; I have left to you the pleasure of
playing with her; I have kept for myself the heaviest cares. While you
have slept, I have watched, I have--Go, monsieur, go! abandon her! leave
this sad refuge. I know how to live with that dear darling creature; I
comprehend her madness, I watch her gestures, I know her secrets. Some
day you will thank me for thus sending you away.”
The colonel left the old monastery, never to return but once. The doctor
was horrified when he saw the effect he had produced upon his guest,
whom he now began to love when he saw him thus. Surely, if either of the
two lovers were worthy of pity, it was Philippe; did he not bear alone
the burden of their dreadful sorrow?
After the colonel’s departure the doctor kept himself informed about
him; he learned that the miserable man was living on an estate near
Saint-Germain. In truth, the baron, on the faith of a dream, had formed
a project which he believed would yet restore the mind of his darling.
Unknown to the doctor, he spent the rest of the autumn in preparing for
his enterprise. A little river flowed through his park and inundated
during the winter the marshes on either side of it, giving it some
resemblance to the Beresina. The village of Satout, on the heights
above, closed in, like Studzianka, the scene of horror. The colonel
collected workmen to deepen the banks, and by the help of his memory, he
copied in his park the shore where General Eble destroyed the bridge.
He planted piles, and made buttresses and burned them, leaving their
charred and blackened ruins, standing in the water from shore to shore.
Then he gathered fragments of all kinds, like those of which the raft
was built. He ordered dilapidated uniforms and clothing of every grade,
and hired hundreds of peasants to wear them; he erected huts and cabins
for the purpose of burning them. In short, he forgot nothing that might
recall that most awful of all scenes, and he succeeded.
Toward the last of December, when the snow had covered with its thick,
white mantle all his imitative preparations, he recognized the Beresina.
This false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of his army
comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once. Monsieur
de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic imitation,
which was talked of in several Parisian circles as a proof of insanity.
Early in January, 1820, the colonel drove in a carriage, the very
counterpart of the one in which he had driven the Comte and Comtesse de
Vandieres from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses, too, were like those he
had gone, at the peril of his life, to fetch from the Russian outposts.
He himself wore the soiled fantastic clothing, the same weapons, as on
the 29th of November, 1812. He had let his beard grow, also his hair,
which was tangled and matted, and his face was neglected, so that
nothing might be wanting to represent the awful truth.
“I can guess your purpose,” cried Monsieur Fanjat, when he saw the
colonel getting out of the carriage. “If you want to succeed, do not
let my niece see you in that equipage. To-night I will give her opium.
During her sleep, we will dress her as she was at Studzianka, and place
her in the carriage. I will follow you in another vehicle.”
About two in the morning, the sleeping countess was placed in the
carriage and wrapped in heavy coverings. A few peasants with torches
lighted up this strange abduction. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke the
silence of the night. Philippe and the doctor turned, and saw Genevieve
coming half-naked from the ground-floor room in which she slept.
“Adieu, adieu! all is over, adieu!” she cried, weeping hot tears.
“Genevieve, what troubles you?” asked the doctor.
Genevieve shook her head with a motion of despair, raised her arm to
heaven, looked at the carriage, uttering a long-drawn moan with every
sign of the utmost terror; then she returned to her room silently.
“That is a good omen!” cried the colonel. “She feels she is to lose her
companion. Perhaps she SEES that Stephanie will recover her reason.”
“God grant it!” said Monsieur Fanjat, who himself was affected by the
incident.
Ever since he had made a close study of insanity, the good man had
met with many examples of the prophetic faculty and the gift of second
sight, proofs of which are frequently given by alienated minds, and
which may also be found, so travellers say, among certain tribes of
savages.
As the colonel had calculated, Stephanie crossed the fictitious plain of
the Beresina at nine o’clock in the morning, when she was awakened by a
cannon shot not a hundred yards from the spot where the experiment was
to be tried. This was a signal. Hundreds of peasants made a frightful
clamor like that on the shore of the river that memorable night, when
twenty thousand stragglers were doomed to death or slavery by their own
folly.
At the cry, at the shot, the countess sprang from the carriage, and ran,
with delirious emotion, over the snow to the banks of the river; she saw
the burned bivouacs and the charred remains of the bridge, and the fatal
raft, which the men were launching into the icy waters of the Beresina.
The major, Philippe, was there, striking back the crowd with his sabre.
Madame de Vandieres gave a cry, which went to all hearts, and threw
herself before the colonel, whose heart beat wildly. She seemed to
gather herself together, and, at first, looked vaguely at the singular
scene. For an instant, as rapid as the lightning’s flash, her eyes had
that lucidity, devoid of mind, which we admire in the eye of birds; then
passing her hand across her brow with the keen expression of one who
meditates, she contemplated the living memory of a past scene spread
before her, and, turning quickly to Philippe, she SAW HIM. An awful
silence reigned in the crowd. The colonel gasped, but dared not speak;
the doctor wept. Stephanie’s sweet face colored faintly; then, from tint
to tint, it returned to the brightness of youth, till it glowed with
a beautiful crimson. Life and happiness, lighted by intelligence, came
nearer and nearer like a conflagration. Convulsive trembling rose from
her feet to her heart. Then these phenomena seemed to blend in one as
Stephanie’s eyes cast forth a celestial ray, the flame of a living
soul. She lived, she thought! She shuddered, with fear perhaps, for God
himself unloosed that silent tongue, and cast anew His fires into that
long-extinguished soul. Human will came with its full electric torrent,
and vivified the body from which it had been driven.
“Stephanie!” cried the colonel.
“Oh! it is Philippe,” said the poor countess.
She threw herself into the trembling arms that the colonel held out to
her, and the clasp of the lovers frightened the spectators. Stephanie
burst into tears. Suddenly her tears stopped, she stiffened as though
the lightning had touched her, and said in a feeble voice,--
“Adieu, Philippe; I love thee, adieu!”
“Oh! she is dead,” cried the colonel, opening his arms.
The old doctor received the inanimate body of his niece, kissed it as
though he were a young man, and carrying it aside, sat down with it
still in his arms on a pile of wood. He looked at the countess and
placed his feeble trembling hand upon her heart. That heart no longer
beat.
“It is true,” he said, looking up at the colonel, who stood motionless,
and then at Stephanie, on whom death was placing that resplendent
beauty, that fugitive halo, which is, perhaps, a pledge of the glorious
future--“Yes, she is dead.”
“Ah! that smile,” cried Philippe, “do you see that smile? Can it be
true?”
“She is turning cold,” replied Monsieur Fanjat.
Monsieur de Sucy made a few steps to tear himself away from the sight;
but he stopped, whistled the air that Stephanie had known, and when she
did not come to him, went on with staggering steps like a drunken man,
still whistling, but never turning back.
General Philippe de Sucy was thought in the social world to be a very
agreeable man, and above all a very gay one. A few days ago, a lady
complimented him on his good humor, and the charming equability of his
nature.
“Ah! madame,” he said, “I pay dear for my liveliness in my lonely
evenings.”
“Are you ever alone?” she said.
“No,” he replied smiling.
If a judicious observer of human nature could have seen at that moment
the expression on the Comte de Sucy’s face, he would perhaps have
shuddered.
“Why don’t you marry?” said the lady, who had several daughters at
school. “You are rich, titled, and of ancient lineage; you have talents,
and a great future before you; all things smile upon you.”
“Yes,” he said, “but a smile kills me.”
The next day the lady heard with great astonishment that Monsieur de
Sucy had blown his brains out during the night. The upper ranks of
society talked in various ways over this extraordinary event, and each
person looked for the cause of it. According to the proclivities of each
reasoner, play, love, ambition, hidden disorders, and vices, explained
the catastrophe, the last scene of a drama begun in 1812. Two men alone,
a marquis and former deputy, and an aged physician, knew that Philippe
de Sucy was one of those strong men to whom God has given the unhappy
power of issuing daily in triumph from awful combats which they fight
with an unseen monster. If, for a moment, God withdraws from such men
His all-powerful hand, they succumb.
ADDENDUM
The following personage appears in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Note: Adieu is also entitled Farewell.
Granville, Vicomte de
The Gondreville Mystery
A Second Home
Farewell (Adieu)
Cesar Birotteau
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
A Daughter of Eve
Cousin Pons