The Project Gutenberg EBook of New Bodies for Old, by Maurice Renard This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: New Bodies for Old Author: Maurice Renard Release Date: June 1, 2019 [EBook #59647] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW BODIES FOR OLD *** Produced by Tim Lindell. David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) NEW BODIES FOR OLD NEW BODIES FOR OLD BY MAURICE RENARD NEW YORK THE MACAULAY COMPANY Copyright, 1923 By MAURICE RENARD PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DEDICATION To H. G. Wells: I beg you, Sir, to accept this book. Of all the pleasures that its writing gave me, that of dedicating it to you is assuredly not the least. I conceived it under the inspiration of ideas that you cherish, and I could have wished that it had come nearer to your own works than it does, not in merit—that would be an absurd pretension—but, at any rate, in that pleasant quality shown in all your books, which allows the chastest minds, as well as those that exact the greatest realism, to have communion with your genius—a communion which the ablest people of our time can acknowledge without feeling its charm lessened by such considerations. But when Fortune for good or ill allowed me to discover the subject of this allegorical novel, I felt bound not to set it aside because of a few audacities which a faithful rendering involved and which an arrest of development alone—that is, a crime against the literary conscience—could avoid. You now know—you could have guessed as much—what I should like people to think of my work, if by chance any one did it the unexpected honor of thinking about it at all. Far from desiring to arouse the creature of instinct in my reader and amuse him with scandalous descriptions, my work is addressed to the philosopher anxious for Truth amid the marvels of Fiction and for Orderliness amid the tumult of imaginary Adventures. That, Sir, is why I beg you to accept it. M. R. [v] [vi] CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 9 CHAPTER I Nocturne 16 II Among the Sphinxes 38 III The Conservatory 65 IV Hot and Cold 84 V “The Madman” 101 VI Nell—the St. Bernard 117 VII Thus Spake Mlle. Bourdichet 136 VIII Rashness 154 IX The Ambush 171 X The Circeean Operation 192 XI In the Paddock 217 XII Lerne Changes His Method of Attack 235 XIII Experiments! Hallucinations! 253 XIV Death and the Mask 262 XV The New Beast 279 XVI The Wizard Finally Dies 300 [vii] NEW BODIES FOR OLD NEW BODIES FOR OLD INTRODUCTION It all happened on a certain winter evening more than a year ago, after the last men’s dinner-party I gave to my friends in the little house which I had taken furnished in the Avenue Victor Hugo. As my projected move was nothing more than the gratification of my vagrant fancy, we had celebrated my house-unwarming as joyfully as we had celebrated the warming of yore, and the time for liqueurs having come (and also the time for jokes) each of us did his best to shine—more especially of course, that naughty fellow Gilbert, Marlotte, our paradoxical friend, the “Triboulet” of our band, and Cardaillac, our licensed wizard. I cannot remember now exactly how it came about, but after an hour spent in the smoking-room, somebody switched off the electric light, and urged us to have some table-turning; so we grouped ourselves in the darkness round a little table. This “somebody” (please observe) was not Cardaillac; but perhaps he was in league with Cardaillac—if indeed Cardaillac was the guilty party. We were exactly eight men in all, eight skeptics versus a little insignificant table which had only one stem divided off at the end into three legs, and whose round top bent under our sixteen hands placed on it in accordance with occult rites! It was Mariotte who instructed us in these rites. He had at one time been an anxious inquirer about witchcraft, and familiar with table-turning, though merely as an outsider, and as he was our customary buffoon, when we saw him assume the direction of the séance, every one just let himself go in anticipation of some excellent clowning. Cardaillac found himself my right-hand neighbor. I heard him stifle a laugh in his throat and cough. Then the table began to turn. Gilbert questioned it, and to his obvious stupefaction it replied by dry cracklings like those made by creaking woodwork, and corresponding to the esoteric alphabet. Mariotte translated in a quavering voice. Then everybody wanted to question the table; and in its replies it gave proof of great sagacity. The audience became serious; one did not know what to think. Queries leapt to our lips, and the replies were rapped out from the foot of the table, near me—as I fancied—and towards my right. “Who will live in this house in a year’s time?” asked in his turn he who had proposed the spiritualistic amusement. “Oh, if you question it about the future,” said Mariotte, “you will only get back thumping lies, or else it will hold its tongue.” “Oh, shut up,” interposed Cardaillac. The question was repeated—“Who will live in this house in a year’s time?” “Nobody,” said the interpreter. “And in two years’ time?” “Nicolas Vermont.” All of us heard this name for the first time. “What will he be doing at this very hour on the anniversary of to-day? Tell us what he is doing—speak.” “He is beginning ... to write here ... his adventures.” “Can you read what he writes?” “Yes ... and also what he will write.” “Tell us the beginning, just the beginning.” “Am tired—alphabet too tedious—Give typewriter ... will inspire typist.” A murmur went round in the darkness. I rose and went to fetch my typewriter, and it was placed upon the table. “It’s a ‘Watson,’” said the table. “I won’t have it. Am a French table. Want a French machine ... want a ‘Durand.’” “‘A Durand?’” said my neighbor on the left, in a disillusioned tone. “Does that brand exist? I don’t know it.” “Nor I.” “Nor I.” “Nor I.” We were much vexed at this untoward circumstance, when the voice of Cardaillac said slowly: [viii] [9] [10] [11] [12] “I use nothing but a ‘Durand,’ would you like me to fetch it?” “Can you type without seeing?” “I shall be back in a quarter of an hour,” said he—and he went out without answering. “Oh, if Cardaillac is going to take it up,” said one of the guests, “we shall have a merry time.” However, when the lights were turned up, the faces seemed sterner than one would have expected. Mariotte was quite pale. Cardaillac came back in a very short time—an astonishingly short time, one might have said. He sat down in front of the table facing his “Durand” machine, and darkness was once more established. Suddenly the table declared: “No need of others.... Put your feet on mine ... type.” One heard the tapping of the fingers on the keys. “It’s extraordinary!” exclaimed the typist-medium, “It’s extraordinary! My hands are writing of their own accord.” “What bosh!” whispered Mariotte. “I swear they are, I swear it,” said Cardaillac. We remained a long time listening to the tapping of the keys which was every now and then broken by the ringing of the bell at the end of the line and the rasping of the carriage. Every five minutes a sheet was handed to us. We decided to retire to the drawing-room and to read them aloud as Gilbert, getting them from Cardaillac, handed them to us. Page 79 was deciphered in the morning light and the machine stopped. But what it had typed seemed to us exciting enough to make us beg Cardaillac to be good enough to give us the sequel. He did so. And when he had passed many nights seated at the little table with his typing keyboard, we had the complete story of M. Vermont’s adventures. The reader shall now be told them. They are strange and scandalous; their future scribe is bound not to think of printing them. He will burn them as soon as they are finished; so that, had it not been for the complaisance of the little table, no one would ever have turned the leaves. That is why I, convinced of their authenticity, consider it piquant to publish them beforehand. For I hold them to be “veridical,”—as the elect call it—although they have some of the characteristics of wild caricature, and rather resemble an art-student’s funny sketch penciled by way of commentary on the margin of an engraving representing Science herself. Are they possibly apocryphal? Well, fables are reputed to be more seductive than History, and Cardaillac’s will not seem inferior to many another one. My hope, however, is that “Dr. Lerne” is the truthful account of real happenings, for in that case, since the little table uttered a prophecy, the tribulations of the hero have not yet begun, and they will be running their course at the very time that this book is divulging them—a very interesting circumstance indeed. At any rate I shall certainly know in two years’ time if M. Nicolas Vermont lives in the little house in the Avenue Victor Hugo. Something assures me of it in advance—for how can one accept the idea of Cardaillac—a serious-minded and intelligent fellow—squandering so many hours in composing such a fable? That is my principal argument in favor of its truthfulness. However, if any conscientious reader desires to find reasons for the faith that is in him, let him betake himself to Grey- l’Abbaye. There he will be informed about the existence of Professor Lerne and his habits. For my part I have not got the leisure for that, but I entreat any one who may undertake the search to let me know the truth, being myself very desirous of getting to the bottom of the question whether the following tale is a mystification of Cardaillac’s, or was really typed out by a clairvoyant table. [13] [14] [15] CHAPTER I NOCTURNE The first Sunday in June was drawing to a close. The shadow of the motor-car was fleeting on ahead of me and getting longer every moment. Ever since the morning, people had been looking at me with anxious faces as I passed, just as one looks at a scene in a melodrama. With my leather helmet which gave me the look of a bald skull, my glasses like port-holes, or the eye- sockets of a skeleton, and my body clothed in tanned skin, I must have seemed to them some queer seal from the nether regions, or one of St. Anthony’s demons, fleeing from the sunlight towards the night, in order to enter therein. And to tell the truth, I had almost a soul like that of one of the Lost; for such is the soul of a solitary traveler who has been for seven hours at a stretch on a racing-car. His spirit has something like a nightmare in it; in place of thought, an obsession is settled there. Mine was a little peremptory phrase—“Come alone, and give notice”—which, like a tenacious goblin, worried my lonely mind, overstrained as it was with joltings and speed. And yet this strange injunction “come alone and give notice,” doubly underlined by my Uncle Lerne in his letter, had not at first struck me excessively. But now that I was obeying it—being alone and having given notice—and rolling along towards the Castle of Fonval, the inexplicable command insisted, so to speak, on displaying all its strangeness. My eyes began to see the fateful expression everywhere, and my ears made it sound in every noise in spite of my efforts to drive away the fixed idea. If I wanted to know the name of a village, the sign-post announced “Come alone”; “Give notice” followed in the wake of a bird’s flight, and the engine, unresting and exasperating, repeated thousands and thousands of times: “Come alone, come alone, come alone, give notice, give notice, give notice.” Then I began to ask myself the wherefore of this wish of my uncle, and not being able to find the reason, I ardently longed for the arrival which should solve the mystery, less curious in reality about the doubtless commonplace answer, than exasperated by so despotic a question. Fortunately I was drawing near, and the country growing more and more familiar spoke so clearly of the old days, that the haunting question relaxed its insistence. The town of Nanthel, populous and busy, detained me, but on coming out of the suburbs I at last perceived, like a vague and very distant cloud, the heights of the Ardennes Mountains. Evening draws on. Desiring to reach the goal before night I open out to the full. The car hums, and under it the road is engulfed in a whirl; it seems to enter the car to be rolled up in it, as the yards of ribbon roll themselves up on a reel. Speed makes its hurricane wind whistle in my ears; a swarm of mosquitoes riddle my face like small shot, and all sorts of little creatures patter on my goggles. Now the sun is on my right; it is on the horizon; the acclivities and declivities of the road, raising me up and sinking me down very quickly, make the sun rise and set for me several times in succession. It disappears. I dash through the dusk as hard as my brave engine can go—and I fancy that the 234 XY has never been excelled. This makes the Ardennes about half an hour away. The cloudy offing is already putting on a green tinge, a forest color, and my heart has leapt within me. Fifteen years! I have not seen those dear great woods for fifteen years—they were my old holiday friends. For it is there, it is in their shadow that the château hides in the depths of an enormous hollow.... I remember that hollow very distinctly and I can already distinguish its whereabouts—a dark stain indicates it. Indeed it is the most extraordinary ravine. My late aunt, Lidivine Lerne, who was fond of legends, would have it that Satan, furious at some disappointment, had scooped it out with a single blow of his gigantic hoof. This origin is disputed. In any case the metaphor gives a vivid picture of the place, an amphitheater with precipitous walls of rock, with no other outlet than a large defile opening on the fields. The plain in other words penetrates into the mountain like a gulf of the sea; it there forms a blind-alley, the perpendicular walls of which rise as it spreads, and whose end is rounded off in a wide sweep. The result is that one gets to Fonval without the least climb, although it is right in the bosom of the mountain. The park is the inner part of the circle, and the cliff serves as a natural wall, except in the direction of the defile. This latter is separated from the domain by a wall into which a gateway has been let. A long avenue leads up to it, straight, and lined with lime trees. In a few minutes I shall be in it ... and soon after I shall know why nobody must follow me to Fonval —“come alone and give notice”—why these orders? Patience. The mass of the Ardennes cleaves itself into clumps. At the rate I am going, each clump seems in motion; gliding rapidly; the crests pass one behind the other, draw near or draw off, seem lower and then rise again with the majesty of waves, and the spectacle is incessantly varying like that of a titanic sea. A turn in the road unmasks a hamlet, I know it well. In the old days, every year, in the month of August, it was before that station that my uncle’s carriage, with Biribi in the shafts, awaited my mother and me. We used to go there for the holidays. All hail Grey-l’Abbaye! Fonval is only three kilometers distant now. I could go there blindfold. Here is the road leading straight to the place, the road which will soon plunge into the woods and take the name of Avenue. It is almost night. A peasant shouts something at me—insults probably. I’m accustomed to that. My hooter replies with its threatening and mournful cry. The forest! Ah, what a potent perfume it has for me—the perfume of the old-time holidays! Can their memory bring any other odor than that of the forest? It is an exquisite odor.... I should like to prolong this festival of scent. Slowing down, the car goes on gently. Its sound becomes a murmur. Right and left the cliff walls of the wide gully begin to rise. Were there more light, I should be coming into sight of Fonval at the end of the straight line of the avenue. Hullo! [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] What’s up?... I had almost upset; the road had unexpectedly made a bend. I slackened off still more. A little further on another bend—then another.... I stopped. The stars one by one were beginning to shed their luminous dew. In the light of the Spring evening I could see above me the high mountain-crests, and the direction of their slopes astonished me. I tried to back, and discovered a bifurcation which I had not noted in passing. When I had taken the road to the right, it offered me after several windings a new branching-off—like a riddle; and then I guided myself in the Fonval direction according to the lie of the cliffs that ran towards the château, but new cross-roads embarrassed me. What had become of the straight avenue?... The thing utterly puzzled me. I switched on the head-lights. For a long time by the aid of their light I wandered among the criss-crossing of the alleys without being able to find my way, so many various offshoots joined the open places, and so balking were the blind- alleys. It seemed to me I had already passed a certain birch-tree. Moreover the cliff walls always remained at the same height; so that I was really turning in a maze and making no advance. Had the peasant of Grey tried to warn me? It seemed probable. None the less, trusting to chance, and piqued by the contretemps, I went on with my exploration. Three times the same crossing showed in the field of light of my lamps, and three times I came on that same birch-tree by different roads. I wanted to call for help. Unfortunately the hooter went wrong, and I had no horn. As for my voice, the distance which separated me from Grey on the one side and Fonval on the other would have prevented its being heard. Then a fear assailed me ... if my petrol gave out!... I halted in the middle of a cross-road and tested the level. My tank was almost empty. What would be the good in exhausting it in vain evolutions! After all, it seemed to me an easy thing to reach the château on foot through the woods.... I tried it. But wire-fences hidden in the bushes blocked the way. Assuredly this labyrinth was not a practical joke played at the entrance of a garden, but a defensive contrivance to protect the approaches of some retreat. Much out of countenance, I began to reflect. “Uncle Lerne, I don’t understand you at all,” thought I. “You received the notice of my arrival this morning, and here am I detained in the most abominable of landscape-gardens.... What fantastic idea made you contrive it? Have you changed more than I thought? You would hardly have dreamt of such fortifications fifteen years ago.” ... “Fifteen years ago, the night, no doubt, resembled this one. The heavens were alive with the same glitter, and already the toads were enlivening the silence with their clear short cries, so pure and sweet. A nightingale was warbling its trills as that one now is doing. Uncle, that evening of long ago was delicious too. And yet my aunt and my mother had just died, within eight days of one another, and the sisters having disappeared, we remained face to face, one a widower, and the other an orphan—you, uncle, and I.” And the man of those far-off days stood before my mind’s eye as the town of Nanthel knew him then, the surgeon already celebrated at thirty-five for the skill of his hand and the success of his bold methods, and who in spite of his fame, remained faithful to his native town—Dr. Frédéric Lerne, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the “Ecole de Médecine,” corresponding member of numerous learned societies, decorated with many divers orders, and—to omit nothing—guardian of his nephew, Nicolas Vermont. This new father whom the Law assigned me I had not met often, for he took no holidays and only passed his summer Sundays at Fonval. And even these he spent in work—ceaseless and secret work. On those days his passion for horticulture, suppressed all the week, kept him shut up in the little hothouse with his tulips and his orchids. And yet, in spite of the rarity of our meetings, I knew him well and loved him dearly. He was a sturdy man, calm and sober, rather cold perhaps, but so kind. In my irreverent way I called his shaven face an “old wife’s face,” and my jesting was quite misplaced, for sometimes he would turn it into an antique visage, lofty and grave, and sometimes into one of delicate mockery (“Regency” style). Among our modern shavelings my uncle was of the few whose head and face by their nobility prove their legitimate descent from an ancestor draped in a toga, and a grandfather clothed in satin, and would allow their scion to wear the costumes of his ancestors without putting them to shame. For the moment Lerne appeared to me decked out in a black overcoat rather badly cut, in which I had seen him for the last time—when I was setting out for Spain. Being a rich man, and wishing me to be one too, my uncle had sent me into the cork business as an employee of the firm Gomez & Co. of Badajoz. And my exile had lasted fifteen years, during which the position of the Professor had certainly become better, to judge by the sensational operations he had performed, the fame of which had reached me in the depths of Estremadura. As for me, my affairs had come to grief. At the end of fifteen years, despairing of ever selling safety-belts and cork on my own account, I had just returned to France to seek another trade, when Fate procured me that of an independent man. It was I who won the lucky number for a million francs, the donor of which wished to remain incognito. In Paris I took comfortable rooms, but without luxury. My flat was convenient and unpretentious. I had the bare [22] [23] [24] [25] necessaries plus a motor-car and minus a family. But before founding a new family, it seemed to me the right thing to renew relations with the old—that is to say with Lerne, and I wrote to him. Not but what after our separation a regular correspondence had been established between us. At the beginning he had given me wise advice and had shown himself pleasantly paternal. His first letter indeed contained the announcement of a Will in my favor hidden in the secret drawer of a desk at Fonval. After the rendering of his accounts as guardian our relations remained as before. Then, suddenly, his messages became different in character, and grew fewer and fewer, their tone becoming that of boredom, then of annoyance. The matter was commonplace, then vulgar, and the phrasing awkward; the very writing seemed to alter. Each time he wrote, these things became more marked, and I had to limit myself every 1st of January to sending my best wishes. My uncle replied with a few scribbled words.... Wounded in the only affection I possessed, I was much afflicted. What had happened? A year before this sudden change—five years before my return to Fonval and my wanderings in the labyrinth—I had read in the “Epoca”: “We have received the news from Paris that Professor Lerne is saying good-by to his patients in order to devote himself to scientific research begun in the hospital of Nanthel. With this aim that excellent physician is retiring to the neighborhood of the town in the Ardennes, to his château of Fonval which has been arranged for that purpose. He is taking with him among others, Dr. Klotz of Mannheim and the three assistants of the Anatomisches Institut founded by this latter at 22, Friedrichstrasse, which has now closed its doors—when shall we have results?” Lerne had confirmed this event to me in an enthusiastic letter, which, however, added nothing to the bald facts in the paragraph. And it was a year later on, I say again, that the change in his nature had taken place. Had twelve months of work ended in failure? Had some bitter disappointment so gravely affected the Professor that he should treat me like a stranger and almost as if I were a bore?... In defiance of his hostility I wrote respectfully and with the utmost possible affection from Paris the letter in which I told him of my good fortune, and I asked his leave to pay him a visit. Never was invitation less engaging than his. He asked me to give him warning of my arrival so that he might order a carriage to go and fetch me from the station. “You will doubtless not remain long at Fonval,” he added, “for Fonval is not a gay place. We are hard at work. Come alone and give notice.” But, Heavens! I had given notice and I was alone!—I who had considered my visit as a duty! Well, well, that was merely a piece of stupidity on my part. And I gazed in bad humor at the star of light on the roads where the exhausted head-lamps were casting no brighter an illumination than a night-light. Without doubt I was going to pass the night in that sylvan jail; nothing would get me out of it before day. The toads of the pool in the Fonval direction called me in vain; vainly the steeple clock of Grey rang out the hours to tell me of the other resting-place—for belfries are really sonorous lighthouses—I was a prisoner. A prisoner! It made me smile. Long ago how frightened I should have been! A prisoner in the Ardennes! At the mercy of Brocéliande, the monstrous forest which with its cavernous shade held a world in darkness between its boundaries, one being at Blois and the other in Constantinople! Brocéliande! that scene of epic tales and puerile legends, country of the four sons of Aymon and of Hop-o’-my-Thumb, the forest of druids and goblins, the wood in which Sleeping Beauty fell into slumber while Charlemagne kept watch! What fantastic stories had not its thickets for a stage—were not the trees themselves living persons? “Oh, Aunt Lidivine,” I murmured, “how well you could give life to all those nonsensical tales every evening after dinner! The dear lady! Did she ever suspect the influence of her stories? Aunt, did you know that all your astounding puppets invaded my life by passing through my dreams? Do you know that a flourish of enchanted trumpets still sounds in my ears sometimes; you who made my nights at Fonval resound with the oliphant of Roland and the horn of Oberon?” At that moment I could not check a movement of vexation; the head-lamps had just gone out after an agonized throb. For a second the darkness was total, and at the same time there was such a profound silence that I could well believe I had suddenly become blind and deaf. Then my eyes gradually became unsealed, and soon the crescent moon appeared, shedding its snowy light on the cold night. The forest became lit up with a frozen whiteness. I shivered. In my aunt’s lifetime it would have been with terror; I should have beheld in the darkness, where the vapors were creeping, dragons wallowing and serpents gliding. An owl flew off. I should have considered that bird the winged helm of a paladin—an enchanted paladin. The birch tree, standing straight up, shone with a lance-like gleam. An oak tree—a son perhaps of the magic tree which was the husband of the Princess Leélina—quivered. It was huge and druidical—a bunch of mistletoe hung on its main branch, and the moon cut through it with a shining sacred sickle. Assuredly the nocturnal landscape was like an hallucination. For want of something better to do, I meditated on it. Without understanding why as well as I do to-day, I used to experience all its suggestiveness, and at nightfall I only [26] [27] [28] [29] ventured out unwillingly. Fonval itself was, I think, in spite of its countless flowers and its beautiful winding alleys, a most forbidding place. Its pointed windows, its hundred years old park inhabited by statues, the stagnant water of its pond, the precipice which closed it in, the Hell-like entrance, all these things made that ancient abbey (transformed into a château) peculiar even in daylight, and one would not have been surprised to learn that everybody there talked in fables. That would have been his real language. That at any rate was how I talked, and still more how I acted, during my holidays. These were for me a long fairy tale in which I played with imaginary or artificial personages, living in the water, in the trees, and under the earth oftener than upon it. If I passed the lawn galloping with my bare legs, my air clearly showed the squadrons of knights were, in my fancy, charging behind me. And the old boat I masted for the occasion with three broomsticks, on which bellied nondescript sails, served me as a galleon, and the pond became the Mediterranean bearing the fleet of the Crusaders. Lost in thought and looking at the water-lily islands and the grass peninsulas, I proclaimed: “Here are Corsica and Sardinia!... Italy is in sight.... We are sailing round Malta....” At the end of a minute I cried “Land!” We were landing in Palestine—“Montjoye and St. Denis!”—I suffered on that boat sea-sickness and home-sickness; the Holy War intoxicated me;—I learnt in it two things—enthusiasm and geography.... But often the other characters were represented. That made it more real. I remembered then—for every child has a Don Quixote in him—I remembered a giant Briareus who was the summerhouse, and especially a barrel which became the dragon of Andromeda. Oh, that barrel! I had made a head for it with the help of a squinting pumpkin, and vampire wings with two umbrellas. Having ambushed my contraption at the bend of an alley, leaning it up against a terra-cotta nymph, I set out in search of it more valiant than the real Perseus, and, armed with a pole, I went caracoling on an invisible hippogriff. But when I discovered it, the pumpkin leered at me so strangely that Perseus almost took flight, and the umbrellas owed it to his emotion that they were broken to pieces in the yellow blood of the facetious vegetable. My puppets did indeed make an impression on me by reason of the rôle I assigned them. As I always reserved for myself that of protagonist, hero, conqueror, I easily surmounted that terror during the day, but at night, though the hero became little Nicolas Vermont, an urchin, the barrel remained a dragon. Cowering under the sheets, my mind excited by the story which my aunt had just finished, I knew the garden was peopled with my terrifying fancies, and that Briareus was mounting guard there all the time, and that the dreadful barrel, resuscitated, hiding its claws with its wings, watched my window from afar. At that age I despaired of ever being, later on in life, like other people, and able to face the dark. And yet my fears did vanish, leaving me impressionable no doubt, but not a coward; and it was indeed I who found myself without dismay lost in the lonely wood—all too empty, alas, of fairies and enchanters. I had just reached this point in my reverie, when a sort of vague noise arose in the Fonval direction; an ox’s lowing, and something like a dog’s long mournful howl. That was all—and then the sleeping calm returned. Some minutes elapsed, and next I heard an owl hoot somewhere between myself and the château; another raised its voice not so far away as the first; and then others took flight from places nearer and nearer me, as if the passage of some creature were scaring them. And indeed a light sound of steps like the trot of some four-footed animal, made itself heard and drew nearer on the roadway. I listened for some time to the beast moving to and fro in the labyrinth, losing itself like me perhaps, and then suddenly it appeared before me. One could not mistake its spreading antlers, the height of its neck and the delicacy of its ears; it was a stag of ten. But hardly had I perceived it than it made off in a sudden volte-face. Then—had it gathered itself in to spring?—its body seemed to me strangely low and paltry, and was it a mere reflection?—seemed to me to be of a white color. The animal disappeared in a twinkling, and its little galloping steps died quickly away. Had I at the first glance taken a goat for a stag? Or had I at the second glance taken a stag for a goat? To tell the truth, I was much interested and puzzled; so much so that I asked myself whether I were not going to resume the soul of the child I had been at Fonval. But a little reflection made me realize that hunger, fatigue and sleepiness, helped out by moonshine, may easily cause one’s eyes to be deceived, and that a ray falling on an object and transforming it is no unwonted phenomenon. I rather regretted it; for, having lost my terror of the mysterious, I had still kept my love for it. I am one of those who are sorry that “Philosophy has clipped an angel’s wings,” and yet I cannot let a mystery remain a mystery for me. Now this beast was really a very extraordinary beast. Wandering as it was through the incomprehensible labyrinth of the wood, it seemed to me an elusive riddle in a problem, and my curiosity was aroused. But utterly wearied as I was, I soon fell asleep pondering detective ruses and subtle logical methods of investigation. I awoke at dawn, and immediately I had a glimpse of a possible end to my imprisonment. Not far from where I was, some men, hidden by the underwood, were walking and talking. Their steps came and went like those of the stag(?) treading, doubtless the same winding ways. At one moment they passed, still hidden, a few [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] paces away from my car, but I could not understand their conversation—it seemed to be in German. At last they stood before me at the very place where the animal had appeared. There were three of them, and they were bending down as if they were following a trail. At the spot where the beast had turned, one of them uttered an exclamation and made a gesture as if they should go back. But they perceived me and I advanced towards them. “Gentlemen,” said I smiling my best, “could you kindly show me the way to Fonval? I have lost myself.” The three men looked at me without replying, in an inquisitive and shy way. They were a very remarkable trio. The first possessed on the top of a massive and squat body a round and calamitously flat face, the thin pointed nose on which, as if it had been shoved into it, made the disc into a sundial. The second had a military air and was twisting his mustache, which was on the German imperial model, and his chin stuck out like the toe of a boot. A tall old man with gold spectacles, gray curly hair and an unkempt beard, made up the trio. He was eating cherries in a noisy way, as a bumpkin eats tripe. They were obvious Germans, doubtless the assistants from the Anatomisches Institut. The tall old man spat out in my direction a salvo of cherry-stones, and in the direction of his comrades, one of those Teuton phrases, in which a hail of shrapnel-like words mingles with other nameless noises. They exchanged in their own way some remarks which resembled so many broadsides, without paying the least attention to me, and then after cleverly imitating with their mouths the sound of a battle going on beside a waterfall— having held a council, in fact—they turned on their heels and left me astounded at their rudeness. But I had to get out of that fix somehow or other. My adventure became hourly more ridiculous. What was the meaning of all this? What comedy was I playing? Was I being made a fool of? I was furious. The would-be secrets I had fancied I scented now seemed to me mere childishness caused by weariness and the dark. The thing was to get away—to get away at once. Raging and without reflection I made the contact which set the car going, and the 80 horse-power engine started to work in the bonnet with the humming of a hive of bees. I seized the starting lever—and then a great guffaw of laughter made me turn round. With his cap over his ears, in blouse of blue, and with his letter-bag on his shoulder, hilarious and triumphant, a postman came on the scene. “Ha, ha! I told you last night that you would lose your way,” said he in a drawling voice. I recognized my villager of Grey-l’Abbaye, and bad temper prevented me answering him. “It’s to Fonval you want to go, is it?” he went on. I cursed Fonval in some very profane language in which I consigned it and its inhabitants to the Devil. “Because,” went on the postman, “if you are going there, I’ll show you the way. I am taking the letters there. But make haste, I have double load to-day; for this is Monday and I don’t come on Sunday.” While saying this, he had drawn his letters from his bag, and was arranging them in his hand. “Show me that,” I cried sharply, “Yes, that yellow envelope.” He looked me up and down distrustfully and then let me look at it from a distance. It was my letter—the announcement of my arrival, which followed it by a night, instead of preceding it by a day! This untoward circumstance absolved my uncle and drove away my rancour. “Get in,” I said. “You shall show me the way and then ... we shall have a talk!” The car set off in the freshness of the morning. A mist was just melting away, as if the sun after whitening the dark had still to dissolve it, and as if this faint fog, now almost nothing, were a portion of the darkness remaining in the form of vapor, an evanescent remainder of the night within the day, the vanishing specter of a vanished phantom. [35] [36] [37] CHAPTER II AMONG THE SPHINXES The car slowly wound its way among the twists and turns of the labyrinth. Sometimes in presence of a cluster of roads the postman himself hesitated for a moment. “Since when have these zigzags taken the place of the straight avenue?” I asked. “Four years ago, Sir—about a year after the settling in of Mr. Learne in the château.” “Do you know the meaning of them? You may speak freely. I am the professor’s nephew.” “Oh, well, he’s ... he’s, well an eccentric man.” “What sort of unusual things does he do?” “Oh, well, nothing. One hardly ever sees him. That’s just the funny part of it. Before he took this higgledy-piggledy into his head, one met him often. He used to walk about in the country, but ever since then ... well, he does take the train to Grey once a month.” So all my uncle’s eccentricities came to a head at the same epoch; the maze and the different style of his letters coincided as to date. Something at that time had profoundly influenced his mind. “And what about his companions?” I went on, “the Germans?” “Oh, as for them, Sir, they are invisible. Moreover, although I go to Fonval six times a week I do not remember when I last clapped eyes on the park. It’s Mr. Lerne himself who comes to the gate for his letters. Oh, what a change! Did you know old John? Well, he’s gone, and his wife too. It’s as true as I’m talking to you, Sir. No more coachman, no more housekeeper ... no more horses.” “That’s been so for four years, you say?” “Yes, Sir.” “Tell me, postman, there’s game about here, is there not?” “Faith, no. A few rabbits, two or three hares—but there are too many foxes.” “What, no roe-deer? no stags?” “Never.” And now I felt a strange thrill of joy. “Here we are, Sir!” After a final bend, the road did open out on the old avenue of which Lerne had kept this little bit. It was fringed by two rows of limes, and from the end of the two rows they formed, the door of Fonval seemed to be coming towards us. In front of it, a carriage-sweep in the shape of a half moon widened the avenue, and beyond that one saw the outline of the blue roof of the château against the green of the trees, and the trees themselves standing out on the somber flanks of the gully. In the midst of the wall which joined the cliffs on either hand stood the door with its tiled porch. It had aged, and the stone of the lintel was worn away; the wood of its panels was worm-eaten and crumbling into powder here and there; but the bell had not changed. Its sound came from my distant boyhood, so bright and clear that I could have wept at it. We waited for a few moments. At last some wooden shoes clattered. “Is that you, Guilloteau?” said a voice with a trans-Rhenish accent. “Yes, Mr. Lerne.” Mr. Lerne! I looked at my guide with eyes wide with wonder—What! Was that my uncle speaking like that? “You are early,” went on the voice. There was the metallic sound of moving bolts; then the door was opened ajar, and a hand was passed through it. “Give me them.” “Here they are, Mr. Lerne. But there is some one with me,” said the postman in an insinuating and timid way. “Who is it?” cried the other—and in the fissure formed by the hardly opened door, he appeared. It was my uncle Lerne. But life had laid hand on him, had made him much older, and turned him into this wild unkempt individual whose straggling gray hair covered his shabby clothes with dirty grease. He seemed smitten with premature old age, and there was an unfriendly gleam in the evil eyes which he fixed on me, from under their knitted eyebrows. [38] [39] [40] [41] “What do you want?” he asked me rudely. He pronounced the words like a German. I had a moment of hesitation. The fact was that his face could no longer be compared to that of a kind old woman; it was a Sioux visage, hairless and cruel, and at the sight of it I experienced the contradictory sensations of recognizing it and not recognizing it. “But, Uncle,” I stuttered finally, “it’s I.... I have come to see you—according to leave given by you. I wrote to you; but my letter ... here it is! my letter and I arrive together. Excuse my carelessness.” “Ah, you should have told me. It is I that ask pardon of you, my dear nephew.” A sudden change this! Lerne showed eagerness to welcome me! he blushed and seemed confused and almost servile. This embarrassment, misplaced with regard to me, shocked me. “Ha ha! you’ve come with a mechanical carriage,” he added. “Hum, there’s a place to put it in, isn’t there?” He opened both folding-doors. “Here one has often to be one’s own servant,” he said, while the old hinges creaked. Thereupon he burst into an awkward sort of laugh. I could have wagered, looking at his perplexed expression, that he had no desire to do so, and that his thoughts were far away from joking. The postman had taken his leave. “Is the coach-house still there?” I said, pointing to the right at a brick building. “Yes, yes. I did not recognize you because of your mustache—hum! Yes, your mustache. You hadn’t one long ago ... had you? Well, and how old are you?” “Thirty-one, uncle.” At the sight of the coach-house my heart stopped. The dog-cart was moldering there, half buried under logs, and there, as in the neighboring stable which was full of odds and ends, the spider webs were hanging whole or in shreds. “Thirty-one, already,” went on Lerne in a vague and obviously distracted manner. “But, Uncle, say tu and toi to me, as long ago.” “Ah, yes, dear ... Nicolas, eh?” I was very ill at ease, but he did not seem more at his ease than I was. My presence clearly annoyed him. It is always an interesting thing for an intruder to learn why he is so,—I seized my valise. Lerne observed my gesture and seemed to form a sudden resolve. “Let it be—let it be, Nicholas,” he said in a tone of command. “I’ll send to fetch your luggage shortly. But first we must have a talk. Come for a walk.” He took my arm and drew me towards the park. He was still reflecting, however. We passed near the château. With few exceptions the shutters were closed. The roof in many places was sinking in, sometimes even broken, and the moldy walls from which the whitewash had disappeared in large flakes here and there showed their masonry. The plants in boxes still surrounded the house, but, to tell the truth, for several winters no one had thought of putting the verbenas and orange-trees and laurels under cover. Standing in their battered and rotten tubs they were all dead. The sandy carriage-drive, of yore so carefully raked, might have imagined itself a second-rate meadow, there was so much grass growing there mingled with nettles and hemlock. It was like the castle of “Sleeping Beauty” on the Prince’s arrival. Lerne, clinging to my arm, walked without further talk. We got to the other side of the dreary pile, and the park lay before our eyes. A jumble. No more baskets of flowers, no more wide, sandy paths like winding ribbons. Except just in front of the château, the lawn—which had been metamorphosed into a paddock fenced with wire and given up to some cattle to feed in—had been encroached on by the valley which had relapsed into its wild state. The garden was no more than a great wood with open spaces and green paths in it. The Ardennes had reassumed their usurped domain. Lerne thoughtfully filled an immense pipe with feverish fingers, lit it, and then we went under the trees into one of the alleys that were like long caves. Once more I saw the statues and with a disillusioned eye, the statues which a former master of Fonval had erected in profusion. Those magnificent dumb personages of my dramas were as a matter of fact wretched modern figures, suggested to some commercially-minded magnate of industry of the Second Empire by Rome or Greece. The tunics of concrete swelled out into crinolines, the drapery of the cloaks was like that of a shawl, and the divinities of the woods— Echo, Syrinx, Arethusa—wore low chignons which filled their bag-like nets—in the Benoiton manner. Those hideous representations of exquisite fantasies, of forest charms transmuted into Dryads, were to-day more passable in their mantles of virgin-vine and clematis, although certain heroes were no more than ivy-clad figures of fun, and although a mere moss-clad attitude represented Diana. [42] [43] [44] [45] After walking for some time, my uncle made me sit down on a bench of stone covered with a coat of lichen, under the shade of flourishing hazels. A little crackling sound made itself heard in the bower right over our heads. Lerne jumped convulsively and raised his head. It was merely a squirrel watching us from the top of a branch. My uncle darted a ferocious glance at it, fixing it as if he were taking aim at it; then he began to laugh in a reassured sort of way. “Ha, ha, ha! it’s only a little ... thing,” said he, unable to find the word. “Really,” thought I within myself, “how queer one may become as one gets old. Environment, I know, is the cause of many evolutions; one adopts the ways and manner of speech of one’s familiars in spite of oneself; the surroundings of Lerne might suffice to explain why my uncle is dirty, expresses himself ill, speaks with a German accent and smokes that huge pipe.... But he has ceased caring for flowers, he no longer looks after his property, and at this moment looks extraordinarily nervous and preoccupied. If one adds to that the happenings of last night, it all seems something less than natural.” Meanwhile the Professor looked at me in a disconcerting way, and eyed me up and down as if here were sizing me up and had never seen me before. I began to lose countenance. A fierce debate was going on within him which was reflected on his face. Every moment our looks crossed, but at last they met, and joined, and my uncle, not being able to hold his peace any longer appeared for the second time to make up his mind. “Nicolas,” he said, patting me on the thigh, “I am a ruined man, you know.” I understood his plan, and was revolted. “Uncle, be frank with me; you want me to go!” “I want you to go! What an idea!” “I am quite sure of it. Your invitation was rather discouraging, and your welcome hardly hospitable. But, uncle, you must have a very short memory if you think me avaricious enough to have come here merely for your money. I see you are no longer the same—your letters indeed made me fear that—and yet it utterly bewilders me that you should have thought of this clumsy subterfuge intended to drive me away. For during these fifteen years I have not changed. I have never ceased venerating you with my whole heart, and have deserved better at your hands than those icy epistles and, above all, better than this insult.” “There, there! Gently!” said Lerne, much annoyed. “Moreover, if you want me to go, just say the word and I’m off. You are no uncle of mine now.” “Don’t talk such blasphemous nonsense, Nicolas.” He said that in a tone of such alarm that I tried intimidation. “And I shall inform against you, uncle, you and your acolytes and your mysteries.” “You are mad, you are mad. Hold your tongue. There’s an idea for you!” Lerne began to laugh loudly, but I don’t know why, his eyes frightened me, and I regretted my phrase. He went on. “Look here, Nicolas, don’t get excited! You are a good fellow. Give me your hand. You shall always find in me your old uncle who loves you. Listen, it’s not true; no, I am not ruined, and my heir will certainly get something—if he acts as I desire. But, as a matter of fact, I think he would do better not to stay here.... There’s nothing here to amuse a man of your age, Nicolas; personally I am busy all day long.” The Professor might talk as he liked now. Hypocrisy showed itself in every word; he was nothing but a contemptible Tartuffe; he was fair game. I determined not to leave till I had completely satisfied my curiosity. So, interrupting him, I said in a tone of deep dejection: “There you are making use of the inheritance business again to make me decide to leave Fonval. You have clearly no trust in me.” With a gesture he deprecated the idea. I went on: “No, allow me to remain in order that we may renew our acquaintance. We both need to do so.” Lerne knitted his eyebrows, t...