It was in the year 16-- that Yves de Cornault, lord of the domain of
Kerfol, went to the pardon of Locronan to perform his religious duties.
He was a rich and powerful noble, then in his sixty-second year, but
hale and sturdy, a great horseman and hunter and a pious man. So all
his neighbours attested. In appearance he seems to have been short
and broad, with a swarthy face, legs slightly bowed from the saddle, a
hanging nose and broad hands with black hairs on them. He had married
young and lost his wife and son soon after, and since then had lived
alone at Kerfol. Twice a year he went to Morlaix, where he had a
handsome house by the river, and spent a week or ten days there; and
occasionally he rode to Rennes on business. Witnesses were found to
declare that during these absences he led a life different from the one
he was known to lead at Kerfol, where he busied himself with his estate,
attended mass daily, and found his only amusement in hunting the wild
boar and water-fowl. But these rumours are not particularly
relevant, and it is certain that among people of his own class in the
neighbourhood he passed for a stern and even austere man, observant of
his religious obligations, and keeping strictly to himself. There was
no talk of any familiarity with the women on his estate, though at that
time the nobility were very free with their peasants. Some people said
he had never looked at a woman since his wife’s death; but such things
are hard to prove, and the evidence on this point was not worth much.
Well, in his sixty-second year, Yves de Cornault went to the pardon at
Locronan, and saw there a young lady of Douarnenez, who had ridden over
pillion behind her father to do her duty to the saint. Her name was Anne
de Barrigan, and she came of good old Breton stock, but much less
great and powerful than that of Yves de Cornault; and her father had
squandered his fortune at cards, and lived almost like a peasant in his
little granite manor on the moors... I have said I would add nothing of
my own to this bald statement of a strange case; but I must interrupt
myself here to describe the young lady who rode up to the lych-gate
of Locronan at the very moment when the Baron de Cornault was also
dismounting there. I take my description from a rather rare thing: a
faded drawing in red crayon, sober and truthful enough to be by a late
pupil of the Clouets, which hangs in Lanrivain’s study, and is said to
be a portrait of Anne de Barrigan. It is unsigned and has no mark of
identity but the initials A. B., and the date 16--, the year after her
marriage. It represents a young woman with a small oval face, almost
pointed, yet wide enough for a full mouth with a tender depression at
the corners. The nose is small, and the eyebrows are set rather high,
far apart, and as lightly pencilled as the eyebrows in a Chinese
painting. The forehead is high and serious, and the hair, which one
feels to be fine and thick and fair, drawn off it and lying close like
a cap. The eyes are neither large nor small, hazel probably, with a look
at once shy and steady. A pair of beautiful long hands are crossed below
the lady’s breast...
The chaplain of Kerfol, and other witnesses, averred that when the Baron
came back from Locronan he jumped from his horse, ordered another to be
instantly saddled, called to a young page come with him, and rode away
that same evening to the south. His steward followed the next morning
with coffers laden on a pair of pack mules. The following week Yves de
Cornault rode back to Kerfol, sent for his vassals and tenants, and
told them he was to be married at All Saints to Anne de Barrigan of
Douarnenez. And on All Saints’ Day the marriage took place.
As to the next few years, the evidence on both sides seems to show that
they passed happily for the couple. No one was found to say that Yves
de Cornault had been unkind to his wife, and it was plain to all that
he was content with his bargain. Indeed, it was admitted by the chaplain
and other witnesses for the prosecution that the young lady had a
softening influence on her husband, and that he became less exacting
with his tenants, less harsh to peasants and dependents, and less
subject to the fits of gloomy silence which had darkened his widow-hood.
As to his wife, the only grievance her champions could call up in her
behalf was that Kerfol was a lonely place, and that when her husband was
away on business at Rennes or Morlaix--whither she was never taken--she
was not allowed so much as to walk in the park unaccompanied. But no
one asserted that she was unhappy, though one servant-woman said she
had surprised her crying, and had heard her say that she was a woman
accursed to have no child, and nothing in life to call her own. But
that was a natural enough feeling in a wife attached to her husband; and
certainly it must have been a great grief to Yves de Cornault that
she gave him no son. Yet he never made her feel her childlessness as a
reproach--she herself admits this in her evidence--but seemed to try to
make her forget it by showering gifts and favours on her. Rich though
he was, he had never been open-handed; but nothing was too fine for
his wife, in the way of silks or gems or linen, or whatever else she
fancied. Every wandering merchant was welcome at Kerfol, and when the
master was called away he never came back without bringing his wife
a handsome present--something curious and particular--from Morlaix or
Rennes or Quimper. One of the waiting-women gave, in cross-examination,
an interesting list of one year’s gifts, which I copy. From Morlaix, a
carved ivory junk, with Chinamen at the oars, that a strange sailor had
brought back as a votive offering for Notre Dame de la Clarte, above
Ploumanac’h; from Quimper, an embroidered gown, worked by the nuns of
the Assumption; from Rennes, a silver rose that opened and showed an
amber Virgin with a crown of garnets; from Morlaix, again, a length
of Damascus velvet shot with gold, bought of a Jew from Syria; and for
Michaelmas that same year, from Rennes, a necklet or bracelet of round
stones--emeralds and pearls and rubies--strung like beads on a gold
wire. This was the present that pleased the lady best, the woman said.
Later on, as it happened, it was produced at the trial, and appears to
have struck the Judges and the public as a curious and valuable jewel.
The very same winter, the Baron absented himself again, this time as far
as Bordeaux, and on his return he brought his wife something even odder
and prettier than the bracelet. It was a winter evening when he rode up
to Kerfol and, walking into the hall, found her sitting listlessly by
the fire, her chin on her hand, looking into the fire. He carried a
velvet box in his hand and, setting it down on the hearth, lifted the
lid and let out a little golden-brown dog.
Anne de Cornault exclaimed with pleasure as the little creature bounded
toward her. “Oh, it looks like a bird or a butterfly!” she cried as she
picked it up; and the dog put its paws on her shoulders and looked at
her with eyes “like a Christian’s.” After that she would never have
it out of her sight, and petted and talked to it as if it had been a
child--as indeed it was the nearest thing to a child she was to know.
Yves de Cornault was much pleased with his purchase. The dog had been
brought to him by a sailor from an East India merchantman, and the
sailor had bought it of a pilgrim in a bazaar at Jaffa, who had stolen
it from a nobleman’s wife in China: a perfectly permissible thing to do,
since the pilgrim was a Christian and the nobleman a heathen doomed to
hellfire. Yves de Cornault had paid a long price for the dog, for they
were beginning to be in demand at the French court, and the sailor knew
he had got hold of a good thing; but Anne’s pleasure was so great that,
to see her laugh and play with the little animal, her husband would
doubtless have given twice the sum.
So far, all the evidence is at one, and the narrative plain sailing;
but now the steering becomes difficult. I will try to keep as nearly as
possible to Anne’s own statements; though toward the end, poor thing...
Well, to go back. The very year after the little brown dog was brought
to Kerfol, Yves de Cornault, one winter night, was found dead at the
head of a narrow flight of stairs leading down from his wife’s rooms to
a door opening on the court. It was his wife who found him and gave the
alarm, so distracted, poor wretch, with fear and horror--for his blood
was all over her--that at first the roused household could not make out
what she was saying, and thought she had gone suddenly mad. But there,
sure enough, at the top of the stairs lay her husband, stone dead, and
head foremost, the blood from his wounds dripping down to the steps
below him. He had been dreadfully scratched and gashed about the face
and throat, as if with a dull weapon; and one of his legs had a deep
tear in it which had cut an artery, and probably caused his death. But
how did he come there, and who had murdered him?
His wife declared that she had been asleep in her bed, and hearing
his cry had rushed out to find him lying on the stairs; but this was
immediately questioned. In the first place, it was proved that from her
room she could not have heard the struggle on the stairs, owing to the
thickness of the walls and the length of the intervening passage; then
it was evident that she had not been in bed and asleep, since she was
dressed when she roused the house, and her bed had not been slept in.
Moreover, the door at the bottom of the stairs was ajar, and the key in
the lock; and it was noticed by the chaplain (an observant man) that the
dress she wore was stained with blood about the knees, and that there
were traces of small blood-stained hands low down on the staircase
walls, so that it was conjectured that she had really been at the
postern-door when her husband fell and, feeling her way up to him in the
darkness on her hands and knees, had been stained by his blood dripping
down on her. Of course it was argued on the other side that the
blood-marks on her dress might have been caused by her kneeling down by
her husband when she rushed out of her room; but there was the open door
below, and the fact that the fingermarks in the staircase all pointed
upward.
The accused held to her statement for the first two days, in spite of
its improbability; but on the third day word was brought to her that
Herve de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been
arrested for complicity in the crime. Two or three witnesses thereupon
came forward to say that it was known throughout the country that
Lanrivain had formerly been on good terms with the lady of Cornault; but
that he had been absent from Brittany for over a year, and people had
ceased to associate their names. The witnesses who made this statement
were not of a very reputable sort. One was an old herb-gatherer
suspected of witch-craft, another a drunken clerk from a neighbouring
parish, the third a half-witted shepherd who could be made to say
anything; and it was clear that the prosecution was not satisfied
with its case, and would have liked to find more definite proof of
Lanrivain’s complicity than the statement of the herb-gatherer, who
swore to having seen him climbing the wall of the park on the night of
the murder. One way of patching out incomplete proofs in those days was
to put some sort of pressure, moral or physical, on the accused person.
It is not clear what pressure was put on Anne de Cornault; but on the
third day, when she was brought into court, she “appeared weak and
wandering,” and after being encouraged to collect herself and speak
the truth, on her honour and the wounds of her Blessed Redeemer, she
confessed that she had in fact gone down the stairs to speak with Herve
de Lanrivain (who denied everything), and had been surprised there by
the sound of her husband’s fall. That was better; and the prosecution
rubbed its hands with satisfaction. The satisfaction increased when
various dependents living at Kerfol were induced to say--with apparent
sincerity--that during the year or two preceding his death their master
had once more grown uncertain and irascible, and subject to the fits
of brooding silence which his household had learned to dread before his
second marriage. This seemed to show that things had not been going well
at Kerfol; though no one could be found to say that there had been any
signs of open disagreement between husband and wife.
Anne de Cornault, when questioned as to her reason for going down at
night to open the door to Herve de Lanrivain, made an answer which must
have sent a smile around the court. She said it was because she was
lonely and wanted to talk with the young man. Was this the only reason?
she was asked; and replied: “Yes, by the Cross over your Lordships’
heads.” “But why at midnight?” the court asked. “Because I could see him
in no other way.” I can see the exchange of glances across the ermine
collars under the Crucifix.
Anne de Cornault, further questioned, said that her married life had
been extremely lonely: “desolate” was the word she used. It was true
that her husband seldom spoke harshly to her; but there were days
when he did not speak at all. It was true that he had never struck or
threatened her; but he kept her like a prisoner at Kerfol, and when he
rode away to Morlaix or Quimper or Rennes he set so close a watch on
her that she could not pick a flower in the garden without having a
waiting-woman at her heels. “I am no Queen, to need such honours,” she
once said to him; and he had answered that a man who has a treasure does
not leave the key in the lock when he goes out. “Then take me with you,”
she urged; but to this he said that towns were pernicious places, and
young wives better off at their own firesides.
“But what did you want to say to Herve de Lanrivain?” the court asked;
and she answered: “To ask him to take me away.”
“Ah--you confess that you went down to him with adulterous thoughts?”
“No.”
“Then why did you want him to take you away?”
“Because I was afraid for my life.”
“Of whom were you afraid?”
“Of my husband.”
“Why were you afraid of your husband?”
“Because he had strangled my little dog.”
Another smile must have passed around the court-room: in days when any
nobleman had a right to hang his peasants--and most of them exercised
it--pinching a pet animal’s wind-pipe was nothing to make a fuss about.
At this point one of the Judges, who appears to have had a certain
sympathy for the accused, suggested that she should be allowed to
explain herself in her own way; and she thereupon made the following
statement.
The first years of her marriage had been lonely; but her husband had
not been unkind to her. If she had had a child she would not have been
unhappy; but the days were long, and it rained too much.
It was true that her husband, whenever he went away and left her,
brought her a handsome present on his return; but this did not make up
for the loneliness. At least nothing had, till he brought her the little
brown dog from the East: after that she was much less unhappy. Her
husband seemed pleased that she was so fond of the dog; he gave her
leave to put her jewelled bracelet around its neck, and to keep it
always with her.
One day she had fallen asleep in her room, with the dog at her feet, as
his habit was. Her feet were bare and resting on his back. Suddenly she
was waked by her husband: he stood beside her, smiling not unkindly.
“You look like my great-grandmother, Juliane de Cornault, lying in the
chapel with her feet on a little dog,” he said.
The analogy sent a chill through her, but she laughed and answered:
“Well, when I am dead you must put me beside her, carved in marble, with
my dog at my feet.”
“Oho--we’ll wait and see,” he said, laughing also, but with his black
brows close together. “The dog is the emblem of fidelity.”
“And do you doubt my right to lie with mine at my feet?”
“When I’m in doubt I find out,” he answered. “I am an old man,” he
added, “and people say I make you lead a lonely life. But I swear you
shall have your monument if you earn it.”
“And I swear to be faithful,” she returned, “if only for the sake of
having my little dog at my feet.”
Not long afterward he went on business to the Quimper Assizes; and while
he was away his aunt, the widow of a great nobleman of the duchy, came
to spend a night at Kerfol on her way to the pardon of Ste. Barbe. She
was a woman of great piety and consequence, and much respected by Yves
de Cornault, and when she proposed to Anne to go with her to Ste. Barbe
no one could object, and even the chaplain declared himself in favour of
the pilgrimage. So Anne set out for Ste. Barbe, and there for the first
time she talked with Herve de Lanrivain. He had come once or twice to
Kerfol with his father, but she had never before exchanged a dozen words
with him. They did not talk for more than five minutes now: it was under
the chestnuts, as the procession was coming out of the chapel. He said:
“I pity you,” and she was surprised, for she had not supposed that any
one thought her an object of pity. He added: “Call for me when you need
me,” and she smiled a little, but was glad afterward, and thought often
of the meeting.
She confessed to having seen him three times afterward: not more. How
or where she would not say--one had the impression that she feared to
implicate some one. Their meetings had been rare and brief; and at the
last he had told her that he was starting the next day for a foreign
country, on a mission which was not without peril and might keep him for
many months absent. He asked her for a remembrance, and she had none
to give him but the collar about the little dog’s neck. She was sorry
afterward that she had given it, but he was so unhappy at going that she
had not had the courage to refuse.
Her husband was away at the time. When he returned a few days later
he picked up the little dog to pet it, and noticed that its collar was
missing. His wife told him that the dog had lost it in the undergrowth
of the park, and that she and her maids had hunted a whole day for it.
It was true, she explained to the court, that she had made the maids
search for the necklet--they all believed the dog had lost it in the
park...
Her husband made no comment, and that evening at supper he was in his
usual mood, between good and bad: you could never tell which. He talked
a good deal, describing what he had seen and done at Rennes; but now
and then he stopped and looked hard at her; and when she went to bed she
found her little dog strangled on her pillow. The little thing was
dead, but still warm; she stooped to lift it, and her distress turned to
horror when she discovered that it had been strangled by twisting twice
round its throat the necklet she had given to Lanrivain.
The next morning at dawn she buried the dog in the garden, and hid the
necklet in her breast. She said nothing to her husband, then or later,
and he said nothing to her; but that day he had a peasant hanged for
stealing a faggot in the park, and the next day he nearly beat to death
a young horse he was breaking.
Winter set in, and the short days passed, and the long nights, one by
one; and she heard nothing of Herve de Lanrivain. It might be that
her husband had killed him; or merely that he had been robbed of the
necklet. Day after day by the hearth among the spinning maids, night
after night alone on her bed, she wondered and trembled. Sometimes at
table her husband looked across at her and smiled; and then she felt
sure that Lanrivain was dead. She dared not try to get news of him, for
she was sure her husband would find out if she did: she had an idea
that he could find out anything. Even when a witch-woman who was a noted
seer, and could show you the whole world in her crystal, came to the
castle for a night’s shelter, and the maids flocked to her, Anne held
back. The winter was long and black and rainy. One day, in Yves
de Cornault’s absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of
performing dogs. Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog
with a feathery coat and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have
been ill-treated by the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she
took it from them. That evening her husband came back, and when she went
to bed she found the dog strangled on her pillow.
After that she said to herself that she would never have another dog;
but one bitter cold evening a poor lean greyhound was found whining at
the castle-gate, and she took him in and forbade the maids to speak of
him to her husband. She hid him in a room that no one went to, smuggled
food to him from her own plate, made him a warm bed to lie on and petted
him like a child.
Yves de Cornault came home, and the next day she found the greyhound
strangled on her pillow. She wept in secret, but said nothing, and
resolved that even if she met a dog dying of hunger she would never
bring him into the castle; but one day she found a young sheep-dog, a
brindled puppy with good blue eyes, lying with a broken leg in the snow
of the park. Yves de Cornault was at Rennes, and she brought the dog
in, warmed and fed it, tied up its leg and hid it in the castle till
her husband’s return. The day before, she gave it to a peasant woman
who lived a long way off, and paid her handsomely to care for it and say
nothing; but that night she heard a whining and scratching at her door,
and when she opened it the lame puppy, drenched and shivering, jumped up
on her with little sobbing barks. She hid him in her bed, and the next
morning was about to have him taken back to the peasant woman when she
heard her husband ride into the court. She shut the dog in a chest and
went down to receive him. An hour or two later, when she returned to her
room, the puppy lay strangled on her pillow...
After that she dared not make a pet of any other dog; and her loneliness
became almost unendurable. Sometimes, when she crossed the court of
the castle, and thought no one was looking, she stopped to pat the old
pointer at the gate. But one day as she was caressing him her husband
came out of the chapel; and the next day the old dog was gone...
This curious narrative was not told in one sitting of the court, or
received without impatience and incredulous comment. It was plain that
the Judges were surprised by its puerility, and that it did not help the
accused in the eyes of the public. It was an odd tale, certainly; but
what did it prove? That Yves de Cornault disliked dogs, and that his
wife, to gratify her own fancy, persistently ignored this dislike.
As for pleading this trivial disagreement as an excuse for her
relations--whatever their nature--with her supposed accomplice, the
argument was so absurd that her own lawyer manifestly regretted having
let her make use of it, and tried several times to cut short her story.
But she went on to the end, with a kind of hypnotized insistence, as
though the scenes she evoked were so real to her that she had forgotten
where she was and imagined herself to be re-living them.
At length the Judge who had previously shown a certain kindness to her
said (leaning forward a little, one may suppose, from his row of dozing
colleagues): “Then you would have us believe that you murdered your
husband because he would not let you keep a pet dog?”
“I did not murder my husband.”
“Who did, then? Herve de Lanrivain?”
“No.”
“Who then? Can you tell us?”
“Yes, I can tell you. The dogs--” At that point she was carried out of
the court in a swoon.
. . . . . . . .
It was evident that her lawyer tried to get her to abandon this line
of defense. Possibly her explanation, whatever it was, had seemed
convincing when she poured it out to him in the heat of their first
private colloquy; but now that it was exposed to the cold daylight of
judicial scrutiny, and the banter of the town, he was thoroughly ashamed
of it, and would have sacrificed her without a scruple to save his
professional reputation. But the obstinate Judge--who perhaps, after
all, was more inquisitive than kindly--evidently wanted to hear
the story out, and she was ordered, the next day, to continue her
deposition.
She said that after the disappearance of the old watch-dog nothing
particular happened for a month or two. Her husband was much as usual:
she did not remember any special incident. But one evening a pedlar
woman came to the castle and was selling trinkets to the maids. She had
no heart for trinkets, but she stood looking on while the women made
their choice. And then, she did not know how, but the pedlar coaxed her
into buying for herself an odd pear-shaped pomander with a strong scent
in it--she had once seen something of the kind on a gypsy woman. She had
no desire for the pomander, and did not know why she had bought it. The
pedlar said that whoever wore it had the power to read the future;
but she did not really believe that, or care much either. However, she
bought the thing and took it up to her room, where she sat turning it
about in her hand. Then the strange scent attracted her and she began to
wonder what kind of spice was in the box. She opened it and found a grey
bean rolled in a strip of paper; and on the paper she saw a sign she
knew, and a message from Herve de Lanrivain, saying that he was at home
again and would be at the door in the court that night after the moon
had set...
She burned the paper and then sat down to think. It was nightfall, and
her husband was at home... She had no way of warning Lanrivain, and
there was nothing to do but to wait...
At this point I fancy the drowsy courtroom beginning to wake up. Even
to the oldest hand on the bench there must have been a certain aesthetic
relish in picturing the feelings of a woman on receiving such a message
at night-fall from a man living twenty miles away, to whom she had no
means of sending a warning...
She was not a clever woman, I imagine; and as the first result of her
cogitation she appears to have made the mistake of being, that evening,
too kind to her husband. She could not ply him with wine, according to
the traditional expedient, for though he drank heavily at times he had
a strong head; and when he drank beyond its strength it was because
he chose to, and not because a woman coaxed him. Not his wife, at any
rate--she was an old story by now. As I read the case, I fancy there was
no feeling for her left in him but the hatred occasioned by his supposed
dishonour.
At any rate, she tried to call up her old graces; but early in the
evening he complained of pains and fever, and left the hall to go up to
his room. His servant carried him a cup of hot wine, and brought back
word that he was sleeping and not to be disturbed; and an hour later,
when Anne lifted the tapestry and listened at his door, she heard his
loud regular breathing. She thought it might be a feint, and stayed a
long time barefooted in the cold passage, her ear to the crack; but the
breathing went on too steadily and naturally to be other than that of a
man in a sound sleep. She crept back to her room reassured, and stood in
the window watching the moon set through the trees of the park. The sky
was misty and starless, and after the moon went down the night was pitch
black. She knew the time had come, and stole along the passage, past her
husband’s door--where she stopped again to listen to his breathing--to
the top of the stairs. There she paused a moment, and assured herself
that no one was following her; then she began to go down the stairs in
the darkness. They were so steep and winding that she had to go very
slowly, for fear of stumbling. Her one thought was to get the door
unbolted, tell Lanrivain to make his escape, and hasten back to her
room. She had tried the bolt earlier in the evening, and managed to put
a little grease on it; but nevertheless, when she drew it, it gave a
squeak... not loud, but it made her heart stop; and the next minute,
overhead, she heard a noise...
“What noise?” the prosecution interposed.
“My husband’s voice calling out my name and cursing me.”
“What did you hear after that?”
“A terrible scream and a fall.”
“Where was Herve de Lanrivain at this time?”
“He was standing outside in the court. I just made him out in the
darkness. I told him for God’s sake to go, and then I pushed the door
shut.”
“What did you do next?”
“I stood at the foot of the stairs and listened.”
“What did you hear?”
“I heard dogs snarling and panting.” (Visible discouragement of the
bench, boredom of the public, and exasperation of the lawyer for the
defense. Dogs again--! But the inquisitive Judge insisted.)
“What dogs?”
She bent her head and spoke so low that she had to be told to repeat her
answer: “I don’t know.”
“How do you mean--you don’t know?”
“I don’t know what dogs...”
The Judge again intervened: “Try to tell us exactly what happened. How
long did you remain at the foot of the stairs?”
“Only a few minutes.”
“And what was going on meanwhile overhead?”
“The dogs kept on snarling and panting. Once or twice he cried out. I
think he moaned once. Then he was quiet.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then I heard a sound like the noise of a pack when the wolf is thrown
to them--gulping and lapping.”
(There was a groan of disgust and repulsion through the court, and
another attempted intervention by the distracted lawyer. But the
inquisitive Judge was still inquisitive.)
“And all the while you did not go up?”
“Yes--I went up then--to drive them off.”
“The dogs?”
“Yes.”
“Well--?”
“When I got there it was quite dark. I found my husband’s flint and
steel and struck a spark. I saw him lying there. He was dead.”
“And the dogs?”
“The dogs were gone.”
“Gone--where to?”
“I don’t know. There was no way out--and there were no dogs at Kerfol.”
She straightened herself to her full height, threw her arms above her
head, and fell down on the stone floor with a long scream. There was a
moment of confusion in the court-room. Some one on the bench was heard
to say: “This is clearly a case for the ecclesiastical authorities”--and
the prisoner’s lawyer doubtless jumped at the suggestion.
After this, the trial loses itself in a maze of cross-questioning and
squabbling. Every witness who was called corroborated Anne de Cornault’s
statement that there were no dogs at Kerfol: had been none for several
months. The master of the house had taken a dislike to dogs, there was
no denying it. But, on the other hand, at the inquest, there had been
long and bitter discussion as to the nature of the dead man’s wounds.
One of the surgeons called in had spoken of marks that looked like
bites. The suggestion of witchcraft was revived, and the opposing
lawyers hurled tomes of necromancy at each other.
At last Anne de Cornault was brought back into court--at the instance of
the same Judge--and asked if she knew where the dogs she spoke of could
have come from. On the body of her Redeemer she swore that she did not.
Then the Judge put his final question: “If the dogs you think you heard
had been known to you, do you think you would have recognized them by
their barking?”
“Yes.”
“Did you recognize them?”
“Yes.”
“What dogs do you take them to have been?”
“My dead dogs,” she said in a whisper... She was taken out of court,
not to reappear there again. There was some kind of ecclesiastical
investigation, and the end of the business was that the Judges disagreed
with each other, and with the ecclesiastical committee, and that Anne de
Cornault was finally handed over to the keeping of her husband’s family,
who shut her up in the keep of Kerfol, where she is said to have died
many years later, a harmless madwoman.
So ends her story. As for that of Herve de Lanrivain, I had only to
apply to his collateral descendant for its subsequent details. The
evidence against the young man being insufficient, and his family
influence in the duchy considerable, he was set free, and left soon
afterward for Paris. He was probably in no mood for a worldly life, and
he appears to have come almost immediately under the influence of the
famous M. Arnauld d’Andilly and the gentlemen of Port Royal. A year or
two later he was received into their Order, and without achieving any
particular distinction he followed its good and evil fortunes till his
death some twenty years later. Lanrivain showed me a portrait of him by
a pupil of Philippe de Champaigne: sad eyes, an impulsive mouth and a
narrow brow. Poor Herve de Lanrivain: it was a grey ending. Yet as
I looked at his stiff and sallow effigy, in the dark dress of the
Jansenists, I almost found myself envying his fate. After all, in the
course of his life two great things had happened to him: he had loved
romantically, and he must have talked with Pascal...