Guy de Maupassant - The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8)
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Guy de Maupassant >> The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8)
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23 THE WORKS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT
VOLUME III
The Viaticum and Other Stories
National Library Company New York
Copyright, 1909, by Bigelow, Smith & Co.
CONTENTS
THE VIATICUM
THE RELICS
THE THIEF
A RUPTURE
A USEFUL HOUSE
THE ACCENT
GHOSTS
CRASH
AN HONEST IDEAL
STABLE PERFUME
THE ILL-OMENED GROOM
AN EXOTIC PRINCE
VIRTUE IN THE BALLET
IN HIS SWEETHEART'S LIVERY
DELILA
A MESALLIANCE
BERTHA
ABANDONED
A NIGHT IN WHITECHAPEL
COUNTESS SATAN
KIND GIRLS
PROFITABLE BUSINESS
VIOLATED
JEROBOAM
THE LOG
MARGOT'S TAPERS
CAUGHT IN THE VERY ACT
THE CONFESSION
WAS IT A DREAM
THE LAST STEP
THE WILL
A COUNTRY EXCURSION
THE LANCER'S WIFE
THE COLONEL'S IDEAS
ONE EVENING
THE HERMAPHRODITE
MARROCA
AN ARTIFICE
THE ASSIGNATION
AN ADVENTURE
THE DOUBLE PINS
UNDER THE YOKE
THE REAL ONE AND THE OTHER
THE UPSTART
THE CARTER'S WENCH
THE MARQUIS
THE BED
AN ADVENTURE IN PARIS
MADAME BAPTISTE
HAPPINESS
THE VIATICUM
"After all," Count d'Avorsy said, stirring his tea with the slow
movements of a prelate, "what truth was there in anything that was said
at Court, almost without any restraint, and did the Empress, whose
beauty has been ruined by some secret grief, who will no longer see
anyone and who soothes her continual mental weariness by some journeys
without an object and without a rest, in foggy and melancholy islands,
and did she really forget Caesar's wife ought not even to be suspected,
did she really give herself to that strange and attractive corrupter,
Ladislas Ferkoz?"
The bright night seemed to be scattering handfuls of stars into the
placid sea, which was as calm as a blue pond, slumbering in the depths
of a forest. Among the tall climbing roses, which hung a mantle of
yellow flowers to the fretted baluster of the terrace, there stood out
in the distance the illuminated fronts of the hotels and villas, and
occasionally women's laughter was heard above the dull, monotonous sound
of surf and the noise of the fog-horns.
Then Captain Sigmund Oroshaz, whose sad and pensive face of a soldier
who has seen too much slaughter and too many charnel houses, was marked
by a large scar, raised his head and said in a grave, haughty voice:
"Nobody has lied in accusing Maria-Gloriosa of adultery, and nobody has
calumniated the Empress and her minister, whom God has damned in the
other world. Ladislas Ferkoz was his sovereign's lover until he died,
and made his august master ridiculous and almost odious, for the man, no
matter who he be, who allows himself to be flouted by a creature who is
unworthy of bearing his name and of sharing his bread; who puts up with
such disgrace, who does not crush the guilty couple with all the weight
of his power, is not worth pity, nor does he deserve to be spared the
mockery. And if I affirm that so harshly, my dear Count--although years
and years have passed since the sponge passed over that old story--the
reason is that I saw the last chapter of it, quite in spite of myself,
however, for I was the officer who was on duty at the palace, and
obliged to obey orders, just as if I had been on the field of
battle--and on that day I was on duty near Maria-Gloriosa."
Madame de Laumieres, who had begun an animated conversation on
crinolines, admist the fragrant odor of Russian cigarettes, and who was
making fun of the striking toilets, with which she had amused herself by
scanning through her opera glass a few hours previously at the races,
stopped, for even when she was talking most volubly she always kept her
ears open to hear what was being said around her, and as her curiosity
was aroused, she interrupted Sigmund Oroshaz.
"Ah! Monsieur," she said, "you are not going to leave our curiosity
unsatisfied.... A story about the Empress puts all our scandals on the
beach, and all our questions of dress into the shade, and, I am sure,"
she added with a smile at the corners of her mouth, "that even our
friend, Madame d'Ormonde will leave off flirting with Monsieur Le
Brassard to listen to you."
Captain Oroshaz continued, with his large blue eyes full of
recollections:
"It was in the middle of a grand ball that the Emperor was giving on the
occasion of some family anniversary, though I forget exactly what, and
where Maria-Gloriosa, who was in great grief, as she had heard that her
lover was ill and his life almost despaired of, far from her, was going
about with her face as pale as that of _Our Lady of Sorrows_, seemed to
be a soul in affliction, appeared to be ashamed of her bare shoulders,
as if she were being made a parade of in the light, while he, the adored
of her heart, was lying on a bed of sickness, getting weaker every
moment, longing for her and perhaps calling for her in his distress.
About midnight, when the violins were striking up the quadrille, which
the Emperor was to dance with the wife of the French Ambassador, one of
the ladies of honor, Countess Szegedin, went up to the Empress, and
whispered a few words to her, in a very low voice. Maria-Gloriosa grew
still paler, but mastered her emotion and waited until the end of the
last figure. Then, however, she could not restrain herself any longer,
and even without giving any pretext for running away in such a manner,
and leaning on the arm of her lady of honor, she made her way through
the crowd as if she were in a dream and went to her own apartments. I
told you that I was on duty that evening at the door of her rooms, and
according to etiquette, I was going to salute her respectfully, but she
did not give me time.
"'Captain,' she said excitedly and vehemently, 'give orders for my own
private coachman, Hans Hildersheim, to get a carriage ready for me
immediately,' but thinking better of it immediately she went on: 'But
no, we should only lose time, and every minute is precious; give me a
cloak quickly, Madame, and a lace veil; we will go out of one of the
small doors in the park, and take the first conveyance we see."
"She wrapped herself in her furs, hid her face in her mantilla, and I
accompanied her, without at first knowing what this mystery was, and
where we were going to, on this mad expedition. I hailed a cab that was
dawdling by the side of the pavement, and when the Empress gave me the
address of Ladislas Ferkoz, the Minister of State, in a low voice, in
spite of my usual phlegm, I felt a vague shiver of emotion, one of those
movements of hesitation and recoil, from which the bravest are not
exempt at times. But how could I get out of this unpleasant part of
acting as her companion, and how show want of politeness to a sovereign
who had completely lost her head? Accordingly, we started, but the
Empress did not pay any more attention to me than if I had not been
sitting by her side in that narrow conveyance, but stifled her sobs with
her pocket handkerchief, muttered a few incoherent words, and
occasionally trembled from head to foot. Her lover's name rose to her
lips as if it had been a response in a litany, and I thought that she
was praying to the Virgin that she might not arrive too late to see
Ladislas Ferkoz again in the possession of his faculties, and keep him
alive for a few hours. Suddenly, as if in reply to herself, she said: 'I
will not cry any more; he must see me looking beautiful, so that he may
remember me, even in death!'
"When we arrived, I saw that we were expected, and that they had not
doubted that the Empress would come to close her lover's eyes with a
last kiss. She left me there, and hurried to Ladislas Ferkoz's room,
without even shutting the doors behind her, where his beautiful,
sensual, gipsy head stood out from the whiteness of the pillows; but his
face was quite bloodless, and there was no life left in it, except in
his large, strange eyes, that were striated with gold, like the eyes of
an astrologer or of a bearded vulture.
"The cold numbness of the death struggle had already laid hold of his
robust body and paralyzed his lips and arms, and he could not reply even
by a sound of tenderness to Maria-Gloriosa's wild lamentations and
amorous cries. Neither reply nor smile, alas! But his eyes dilated, and
glistened like the last flame that shoots up from an expiring fire, and
filled them with a world of dying thoughts, of divine recollections, of
delirious love. They appeared to envelope her in kisses, they spoke to
her, they thanked her, they followed her movements, and seemed delighted
at her grief. And as if she were replying to their mute supplications,
as if she had understood them, Maria-Gloriosa suddenly tore off her
lace, threw aside her fur cloak, stood erect beside the dying man, whose
eyes were radiant, desirable in her supreme beauty with her bare
shoulders, her bust like marble and her fair hair, in which diamonds
glistened, surrounding her proud head, like that of the Goddess Diana,
the huntress, and with her arms stretched out towards him in an attitude
of love, of embrace and of blessing. He looked at her in ecstacy, he
feasted on her beauty, and seemed to be having a terrible struggle with
death, in order that he might gaze at her, that apparition of love, a
little longer, see her beyond eternal sleep and prolong this unexpected
dream. And when he felt that it was all over with him, and that even his
eyes were growing dim, two great tears rolled down his cheeks....
"When Maria-Gloriosa saw that he was dead, she piously and devoutly
kissed his lips and closed his eyes, like a priest who closes the gold
tabernacle after service, on an evening after benediction, and then,
without exchanging a word, we returned through the darkness to the
palace where the ball was still going on."
* * * * *
There was a minute's silence, and while Madame de Laumieres, who was
very much touched by this story and whose nerves were rather highly
strung, was drying her tears behind her open fan, suddenly the harsh and
shrill voices of the fast women who were returning from the Casino, by
the strange irony of fate, struck up an idiotic song which was then in
vogue: "_Oh! the poor, oh! the poor, oh! the poor, dear girl!_"
THE RELICS
They had given him a grand public funeral, like they do victorious
soldiers who have added some dazzling pages to the glorious annals of
their country, who have restored courage to desponding heads and cast
over other nations the proud shadow of their country's flag, like a yoke
under which those went who were no longer to have a country, or liberty.
During a whole bright and calm night, when falling stars made people
think of unknown metamorphoses and the transmigration of souls, who
knows whether tall cavalry soldiers in their cuirasses and sitting as
motionless as statues on their horses, had watched by the dead man's
coffin, which was resting, covered with wreaths, under the porch of the
heroes, every stone of which is engraved with the name of a brave man,
and of a battle.
The whole town was in mourning, as if it had lost the only object that
had possession of its heart, and which it loved. The crowd went silently
and thoughtfully down the avenue of the _Champs Elysees_, and they
almost fought for the commemorative medals and the common portraits
which hawkers were selling, or climbed upon the stands which street boys
had erected here and there, and whence they could see over the heads of
the crowd. The _Place de la Concorde_ had something solemn about it,
with its circle of statues hung from head to foot with long crape
coverings, which looked in the distance like widows, weeping and
praying.
According to his last wish, Jean Ramel had been conveyed to the Pantheon
in the wretched paupers' hearse, which conveys them to the common grave
at the shambling trot of some thin and broken-winded horse.
That dreadful, black conveyance without any drapery, without plumes and
without flowers, which was followed by Ministers and deputies, by
several regiments with their bands, and their flags flying above the
helmets and the sabers, by children from the national schools, by
delegates from the provinces, and an innumerable crowd of men in
blouses, of women, of shop-keepers from every quarter, had a most
theatrical effect, and while standing on the steps of the Pantheon, at
the foot of the massive columns of the portico, the orators successively
discanted on his apotheosis, tried to make their voices predominate over
the noise, emphasized their pompous periods, and finished the
performance by a poor third act, which makes people yawn and gradually
empties the theater, people remembered who that man had been, on whom
such posthumous honors were being bestowed, and who was having such a
funeral: it was Jean Ramel.
Those three sonorous syllables called up a lionine head, with white hair
thrown back in disorder, like a mane, with features that looked as if
they had been cut out with a bill-hook, but which were so powerful, and
in which there lay such a flame of life, that one forgot their vulgarity
and ugliness; with black eyes under bushy eyebrows, which dilated and
flashed like lightning, now were veiled as if in tears and then were
filled with serene mildness, with a voice which now growled so as almost
to terrify its hearers, and which would have filled the hall of some
working men's club, full of the thick smoke from strong pipes without
being affected by it, and then would be soft, coaxing, persuasive and
unctuous like that of a priest who is holding out promises of Paradise,
or giving absolution for our sins.
He had had the good luck to be persecuted, to be in the eyes of the
people, the incarnation of that lying formula which appears on every
public edifice, of those three words of the _Golden Age_, which make
those who think, those who suffer and those who govern, smile somewhat
sadly, _Liberty, Fraternity, Equality_. Luck had been kind to him, had
sustained, had pushed him on by the shoulders, and had set him up on his
pedestal again when he had fallen down, like all idols do.
He spoke and he wrote, and always in order to announce the good news to
all the multitudes who suffered--no matter to what grade of society they
might belong--to hold out his hand to them and to defend them, to attack
the abuses of the _Code_--that book of injustice and severity--to speak
the truth boldly, even when it lashed his enemies as if it had been a
whip.
His books were like Gospels, which are read chapter by chapter, and
warmed the most despairing and the most sorrowing hearts, and brought
comfort, hope and dreams to each.
He had lived very modestly until the end, and appeared to spend nothing;
and he only kept one old servant, who spoke to him in the Basque
dialect.
That chaste philosopher, who had all his life long feared women's snares
and wiles, who had looked upon love as a luxury made only for the rich
and idle, which unsettles the brain and interferes with acuteness of
thought, had allowed himself to be caught like an ordinary man, late in
life, when his hair was white and his forehead deeply wrinkled.
It was not, however, as happens in the visions of solitary ascetics,
some strange queen or female magician, with stars in her eyes and
witchery in her voice, some loose woman who held up the symbolical lamp
immodestly, to light up her radiant nudity, and the pink and white
bouquet of her sweet-smelling skin, some woman in search of voluptuous
pleasures, whose lascivious appeals it is impossible for any man to
listen to, without being excited to the very depths of his being.
Neither a princess out of some fairy tale, nor a frail beauty who was an
expert in the art of reviving the ardor of old men, and of leading them
astray, nor a woman who was disgusted with her ideals, that always
turned out to be alike, and who dreamt of awakening the heart of one of
those men who suffer, who have afforded so much alleviation to human
misery, who seemed to be surrounded by a halo, and who never knew
anything but the true, the beautiful and the good.
It was only a little girl of twenty, who was as pretty as a wild flower,
who had a ringing laugh, white teeth, and a mind that was as spotless as
a new mirror, in which no figure has been reflected as yet.
He was in exile at the time for having given public expression to what
he thought, and he was living in an Italian village which was buried in
chestnut trees and situated on the shores of a lake that was narrow and
so transparent that it might have been taken for some nobleman's fish
pond that was like an emerald in a large park. The village consisted of
about twenty red-tiled houses. Several paths paved with flint led up the
side of the hill among the vines where the Madonna, full of grace and
goodness extended her indulgence.
For the first time in his life Ramel remarked that there were some lips
that were more desirable, more smiling than others, that there was hair
in which it must be delicious to bury the fingers like in fine silk, and
which it must be delightful to kiss, and that there were eyes which
contained an infinitude of caresses, and he had spelled right through
the eclogue, which at length revealed true happiness to him, and he had
had a child, a son, by her.
This was the only secret that Ramel jealously concealed, and which no
more than two or three of his oldest friends knew anything about, and
while he hesitated about spending twopence on himself, and went to the
Institute and to the Chamber of Deputies outside an omnibus, Pepa led
the happy life of a millionaire who is not frightened of the to-morrow,
and brought up her son like a little prince, with a tutor and three
servants, who had nothing to do but to look after him.
All that Ramel made went into his mistress's hands, and when he felt
that his last hour was approaching, and that there was no hope of his
recovery--in full possession of his faculties and joy in his dull
eyes--he gave his name to Pepa, and made her his lawful widow, in the
presence of all his friends. She inherited everything that her former
lover left behind, a considerable income from his share of the annual
profits on his books, and also his pension, which the State continued to
pay to her.
Little Ramel throve wonderfully amidst all this luxury, and gave free
scope to his instincts and his caprices, without his mother ever having
the courage to reprove him in the least, and he did not bear the
slightest resemblance to Jean Ramel.
Full of pranks, effeminate, a superfine dandy, and precociously vicious,
he suggested the idea of those pages at the Court of Florence, whom we
frequently meet with in _The Decameron_, and who were the playthings for
the idle hands and tips of the patrician ladies.
He was very ignorant and lived at a great rate, bet on races, and played
cards for heavy stakes with seasoned gamblers, old enough to be his
father. And it was distressing to hear this lad joke about the memory of
him whom he called _the old man_, and persecute his mother because of
the worship and adoration which she felt for Jean Ramel, whom she spoke
of as if he had become a demigod when he died, like in Roman theogony.
He would have liked altogether to have altered the arrangement of that
kind of sanctuary, the drawing-room, where Pepa kept some of her
husband's manuscripts, the furniture that he had most frequently used,
the bed on which he had died, his pens, his clothes and his weapons. And
one evening, not knowing how to dress himself up more originally than
the rest for a masked ball that stout Toinette Danicheff was going to
give as her house-warming, without saying a word to his mother, he took
down the Academician's dress, the sword and cocked hat that had belonged
to Jean Ramel, and put it on as if it had been a disguise on Shrove
Tuesday.
Slightly built and with thin arms and legs, the wide clothes hung on
him, and he was a comical sight with the embroidered skirt of his coat
sweeping the carpet, and his sword knocking against his heels. The
elbows and the collar were shiny and greasy from wear, for the _Master_
had worn it until it was threadbare, to avoid having to buy another, and
had never thought of replacing it.
He made a tremendous hit, and fair Liline Ablette laughed so at his
grimaces and his disguise, that that night she threw over Prince
Noureddin for him, although he had paid for her house, her horses and
everything else, and allowed her six thousand francs a month--L240--for
extras and pocket money.
THE THIEF
"Certainly," Dr. Sorbier exclaimed, who, while appearing to be thinking
of something else, had been listening quietly to those surprising
accounts of burglaries and of daring acts which might have been borrowed
from the trial of Cartouche; "certainly, I do not know any viler fault,
nor any meaner action than to attack a girl's innocence, to corrupt her,
to profit by a moment of unconscious weakness and of madness, when her
heart is beating like that of a frightened fawn, when her body, which
has been unpolluted up till then, is palpitating with mad desire and her
pure lips seek those of her seducer; when her whole being is feverish
and vanquished, and she abandons herself without thinking of the
irremediable stain, nor of her fall nor of the painful awakening on the
morrow.
"The man who has brought this about slowly, viciously, and who can tell
with what science of evil, and who, in such a case, has not steadiness
and self-restraint enough to quench that flame by some icy words, who
has not sense enough for two, who cannot recover his self-possession and
master the runaway brute within him, and who loses his head on the edge
of the precipice over which she is going to fall, is as contemptible as
any man who breaks open a lock, or as any rascal on the look-out for a
house left defenseless and without protection, or for some easy and
profitable stroke of business, or as that thief whose various exploits
you have just related to us.
"I, for my part, utterly, refuse to absolve him even when extenuating
circumstances plead in his favor, even when he is carrying on a
dangerous flirtation, in which a man tries in vain to keep his balance,
not to exceed the limits of the game, any more than at lawn tennis; even
when the parts are inverted and a man's adversary is some precocious,
curious, seductive girl, who shows you immediately that she has nothing
to learn and nothing to experience, except the last chapter of love, one
of those girls from whom may fate always preserve our sons, and whom a
psychological novel writer has christened _The Semi-Virgins_.
"It is, of course, difficult and painful for that coarse and
unfathomable vanity which is characteristic of every man, and which
might be called _malism_, not to stir such a charming fire, to act the
Joseph and the fool, to turn away his eyes, and, as it were, to put wax
into his ears, like the companions of Ulysses did when they were
attracted by the divine, seductive songs of the sirens, just to touch
that pretty table, covered with a perfectly new cloth, at which you are
invited to take a seat before any one else, in such a suggestive voice,
and are requested to quench your thirst and to taste that new wine,
whose fresh and strange flavor you will never forget. But who would
hesitate to exercise such self-restraint if, when he rapidly examined
his conscience, in one of those instinctive returns to his sober self,
in which a man thinks clearly and recovers his head; if he were to
measure the gravity of his fault, think of his fault, think of its
consequences, of the reprisals, of the uneasiness which he would always
feel in the future, and which would destroy the repose and the happiness
of his life?
"You may guess that behind all these moral reflections, such as a
gray-beard like myself may indulge in, there is a story hidden, and sad
as it is, I am sure it will interest you on account of the strange
heroism that it shows."
He was silent for a few moments as if to classify recollections, and
with his elbows resting on the arms of his easy chair, and his eyes
looking into space, he continued in the slow voice of a hospital
professor, who is explaining a case to his class of medical students, at
a bedside:
"He was one of those men who, as our grandfathers used to say, never met
with a cruel woman, the type of the adventurous knight who was always
foraging, who had something of the scamp about him, but who despised
danger and was bold even to rashness. He was ardent in the pursuit of
pleasure, and a man who had an irresistible charm about him, one of
those men in whom we excuse the greatest excesses, as the most natural
things in the world. He had run through all his money at gambling and
with pretty girls, and so became, as it were, a soldier of fortune, who
amused himself whenever and however he could, and was at that time
quartered at Versailles.
"I knew him to the very depths of his childish heart, which was only too
easily penetrated and sounded, and I loved him like some old bachelor
uncle loves a nephew who plays him some tricks, but who knows how to
make him indulgent towards him, and how to wheedle him. He had made me
his confidant far more than his adviser, kept me informed of his
slightest tricks, though he always pretended to be speaking about one of
his friends, and not about himself, and I must confess that his youthful
impetuosity, his careless gaiety and his amorous ardor sometimes
distracted my thoughts and made me envy the handsome, vigorous young
fellow who was so happy at being alive, so that I had not the courage to
check him, to show him his right road, and to call out to him, 'Take
care!' as children do at blind man's buff.
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