Le Roi au Masque d’Or 👑🎭
The King in the Golden Mask is a mysterious and fascinating tale where the line between reality and fiction blurs. The story takes place in a strange world, where the king, hidden under an enigmatic mask, must face moral dilemmas and surprising trials. Through enigmatic characters and unexpected situations, the author immerses us in a universe of reflection on truth and illusion. Prepare to discover a captivating story that will awaken your imagination and keep you in suspense until the last page. Chapter 1. To Anatole France. . The king in the golden mask rose from the black throne where he had been sitting for hours, and asked the cause of the tumult. For the gate guards had crossed their pikes and the sound of iron could be heard. Around the bronze brazier stood the fifty priests on the right and the fifty jesters on the left, and the women in a semicircle before the king waved their hands. The pink and purple flame that radiated through the brazier’s brazier made the masks of the faces shine. In imitation of the emaciated king, the women, the jesters, and the priests had immutable faces of silver, iron, copper, wood, and cloth. And the jesters’ masks were open with laughter, while the priests’ masks were black with worry. Fifty hilarious faces bloomed on the left, and on the right fifty sad faces scowled. Meanwhile, the light fabrics stretched over the women’s heads mimicked eternally graceful faces animated by an artificial smile. But the king’s golden mask was majestic, noble, and truly royal. Now the king remained silent and, in this silence, resembled the race of kings of which he was the last. The city had once been governed by princes who wore their faces uncovered; But long ago a long horde of masked kings had risen up. No man had seen the faces of these kings, and even the priests were ignorant of the reason. However, the order had been given, since ancient times, to cover the faces of those who approached the royal residence; and this family of kings knew only the masks of men. And while the ironwork of the gate guards trembled and their sonorous weapons clanged, the king questioned them in a grave voice:
“Who dares to disturb me, at the hours when I sit among my priests, my jesters and my women!” And the guards answered, trembling: “Most imperious king, golden mask, he is a miserable man, dressed in a long robe; he seems to be one of those pious beggars who wander through the country, and his face is uncovered. ” “Let this beggar enter,” said the king. Then the priest with the gravest mask turned toward the throne and bowed: “O king,” he said, “the oracles have foretold that it is not good for your race to see the faces of men.” And the jester whose mask was pierced by the loudest laughter turned his back to the throne and bowed: “O beggar,” he said, “whom I have not yet seen, doubtless you are more of a king than the king with the golden mask, since it is forbidden to look at you.” And the woman whose false face had the silkiest down clasped her hands, spread them, and bent them as if to grasp the sacrificial vessels. Now the king, bending his eyes toward her, feared the revelation of an unknown face. Then an evil desire crept into his heart. “Let this beggar enter,” said the king with the golden mask. And among the quivering forest of pikes, between which the blades of the swords sprang like shining leaves of steel, splashed with green gold and red gold, an old man with a bristling white beard advanced to the foot of the throne, and raised towards the king a naked face in which uncertain eyes trembled. “Speak,” said the king. The beggar replied in a loud voice: “If the one who addresses me is the man masked in gold, I will certainly answer; and I think that it is he.” Who would dare, before him, raise their voice? But I cannot assure myself of this by sight—for I am blind. Yet I know that there are women in this room, by the polite rubbing of their hands on their shoulders; and there are jesters, I hear laughter; and there are priests, since these whisper in a grave way. Now the men of this country have told me that you are masked; and you, king with the golden mask, last of your race, you have never contemplated faces of flesh. Listen: you are a king and you do not know the people. These on my left are the jesters—I hear them laughing; these on my right are the priests—I hear them crying; and I perceive that the muscles of the faces of these women are grimacing. Now the king turned to those whom the beggar called jesters, and his gaze found the priests’ black masks of worry; and he turned to those whom the beggar called priests, and his gaze found the jesters’ open masks of laughter; and he looked down at the crescent of his seated women, and their faces seemed beautiful to him. “You lie, strange man,” said the king; “and you yourself are the laugher, the weeper, and the grimacer; for your horrible face, incapable of fixity, was made mobile in order to dissemble. Those whom you have designated as jesters are my priests, and those whom you have designated as priests are my jesters. And how could you judge, you whose face creases at every word, of the immutable beauty of my women?” “Neither of that one, nor of yours,” said the beggar in a low voice, “for I can know nothing about it, being blind, and you yourself know nothing about the others or about yourself. But I am superior to you in this: I know that I know nothing. And I can conjecture. Now perhaps those who seem to you to be jesters weep beneath their masks; and it is possible that those who seem to you to be priests have their true faces twisted by the joy of deceiving you; and you do not know whether the cheeks of your women are not ashen-colored beneath the silk. And you yourself, king masked in gold, who knows if you are not horrible despite your finery?” Then the jester with the widest mouth split with gaiety uttered a sneer like a sob; and the priest with the darkest brow uttered a supplication like nervous laughter, and all the women’s masks trembled. And the king with the golden face made a sign. And the guards seized the naked-faced old man by the shoulders and threw him through the great door of the hall. The night passed, and the king was restless while he slept. And in the morning he wandered through his palace, because an evil desire had crept into his heart. But neither in the bedrooms, nor in the high, paved hall of feasting, nor in the painted and gilded halls of revelry, did he find what he sought. Throughout the entire expanse of the royal residence there was not a single mirror. This had been established by the order of the oracles and the ordinance of the priests for many years. The king on his black throne did not entertain the jesters, nor listen to the priests, nor look at his wives: for he was thinking of his face. When the setting sun cast the light of its bloody metals towards the palace windows , the king left the brazier room, pushed aside the guards, quickly crossed the seven concentric courtyards enclosed by seven glittering walls, and went out darkly into the countryside through a low postern gate. He was trembling and curious. He knew that he would encounter other faces, and perhaps his own. Deep down, he wanted to be sure of his own beauty. Why had this miserable beggar slipped doubt into his chest? The king with the golden mask arrived among the woods that encircled the bank of a river. The trees were clad in polished, gleaming bark. There were boles dazzling with whiteness. The king broke off a few branches. Some bled a little frothy sap at the break, and the interior remained marbled with brown spots; others revealed secret mold and black cracks. The earth was dark and damp under the variegated carpet of marijuana and small flowers. The king turned over with his foot a person of all body types, a blue-veined block, whose glitter shimmered in the last rays; and a toad in a soft pouch escaped from its muddy hiding place with a startled jump. At the edge of the wood, on the crown of the bank, the king, emerging from the trees, stopped, charmed. A young girl was sitting on the marijuana; the king saw her hair twisted high, her gracefully curved neck, her supple loins which made her body undulate down to her shoulders; for she was turning a very swollen spindle between two fingers of her left hand , and the tip of a thick distaff tapered near her cheek. She stood up, stunned, showed her face, and, in her confusion, took between her lips the strands of the yarn she was kneading. Thus her cheeks seemed to be traversed by a struggle for mental health of pale shade. When the king saw those agitated black eyes, and those delicate palpitating nostrils, and that trembling of the lips, and that roundness of the chin descending towards the throat caressed with pink light, he rushed, transported, towards the young girl and violently took her hands. “I would like,” he said, “for the first time, to adore a naked face; I would like to remove this golden mask, since it separates me from the air that kisses your skin; and we would both go, amazed, to look at ourselves in the river.” The young girl touched with the tips of her fingers the metallic blades of the royal mask in surprise. Meanwhile the king impatiently undid the golden hooks; the mask rolled in the marijuana, and the young girl, stretching her hands over her eyes, uttered a cry of horror. The next moment she fled among the shadow of the wood, clutching to her breast her distaff swaddled in hemp. The girl’s cry echoed painfully in the king’s heart. He ran to the bank, bent down toward the river water, and from his own lips a hoarse moan burst forth. As the sun disappeared behind the brown and blue hills of the horizon, he had just perceived a whitish, swollen face, covered with scales, with its skin raised by hideous swellings, and he knew at once, through the memory of books, that he was leprous. The moon, like an aerial yellow mask, rose above the trees. Occasionally, the beating of wet wings could be heard among the reeds. A person of mist floated along the river. The shimmering of the water extended to a great distance and was lost in the bluish depths. Scarlet-headed birds rustled the current in circles that slowly dissipated. And the king, standing, kept his arms apart from his body, as if he were disgusted with touching himself. He lifted the mask and placed it on his face. Seeming to walk in a dream, he went towards his palace. He struck the gong at the gate of the first wall, and the guards came out in a tumult with their torches. They lit up his golden face; and the king’s heart was gripped with anguish, thinking that the guards saw white scales on the metal. And he crossed the moonlit courtyard; and seven times his heart was gripped with the same anguish at the seven gates where the guards carried the red torches to his golden mask. Meanwhile, pain grew in him with rage, like a black plant wrapped around a tawny plant. And the dark and murky fruits of pain and rage came to his lips, and he tasted their bitter juice. He entered the palace, and the guard on his left turned on the tip of one foot, having the other leg extended, crowning himself with a luminous circlet of his saber; and the guard on his right turned on the tip of the other foot, having extended his opposite leg, crowning himself with a dazzling pyramid by rapid whirls of his diamond mace. And the king did not even remember that these were the ceremonies nocturnal; but he passed shivering, having imagined that the men -at-arms wanted to cut down or split his hideous swollen head. The halls of the palace were deserted. A few solitary torches burned low in their rings. Others had gone out and wept cold tears of resin. The king crossed the banquet halls where the cushions embroidered with red tulips and yellow chrysanthemums were still scattered, with ivory swings and gloomy ebony seats; enhanced with gold stars. Veils gummed and painted with birds with variegated feet and silver beaks hung from the ceiling where the mouths of beasts in colored wood were set. There were greenish bronze torches, made of a single piece, and pierced with prodigious holes lacquered in red, where a strand of unbleached silk passed through the center of pressed roundels of an oily black.
There were long armchairs, low and arched, where one could not lie down without one’s back being raised, as if carried by hands. There were vases cast of almost transparent metals, which rang under the finger in a shrill manner, as if they were wounded. At the far end of the room, the king seized a bronze torch which darted its red tongues into the darkness. The flaming droplets of resin fell, quivering, on its silk sleeves. But the king did not notice them. He went toward a high, dark gallery, where the resin left a fragrant furrow. There, on the walls cut by crossed diagonals, one saw brilliant and mysterious portraits : for the paintings were masked and surmounted by tiaras. Only the oldest portrait, set apart from the others, represented a pale young man, with eyes dilated with terror, the lower part of his face hidden by the royal ornaments. The king stopped before this portrait and lit it by lifting the torch. Then he groaned and said: O first of my race, my brother, how pitiful we are! And he kissed the portrait on the eyes. And before the second painted figure, which was masked, the king stopped and tore the canvas of the mask, saying: This is what should have been done, my father, second of my race. And so he tore the masks of all the other kings of his race, even himself. Under the torn masks, one saw the dark nudity of the wall. Then he came to the banqueting halls where the shining tables were still set. He raised the torch above his head, and purple lines rushed toward the corners. In the center of the tables was a throne with lion’s feet, over which drooped a spotted fur; glassware seemed piled up at the corners, with pieces of polished silver and lids pierced with smoky gold. Some of the flasks shimmered with violet gleams; others were plated inside with thin translucent blades of precious metal. Like a terrible indication of blood, a flash from the torch made an oblong cup, cut from a garnet, glitter, and into which the cupbearers were accustomed to pouring the wine of kings. And the light also caressed with vermilion a basket of woven silver in which were arranged round loaves with sound crusts. And the king crossed the banqueting halls, turning his head away. They were not ashamed, he said, to bite under their mask into the vigorous bread, and to touch the bleeding wine with their white lips! Where is he who, knowing his evil, forbade the mirrors of his house? He is among those whose false faces I tore off: and I ate bread from his basket, and I drank wine from his cup… They arrived by a narrow gallery paved with mosaic to the bedrooms , and the king glided there, carrying before him his bloody torch. A guard advanced, seized with anxiety, and his belt of wide rings blazed on his white tunic; then he recognized the king by his golden face and prostrated himself. From a bronze lamp suspended in the center, a pale light illuminated a double row of state beds; the silk covers were woven with filaments of ancient shades. An onyx pipe let monotonous drops flow into a polished stone basin. First the king considered the priests’ apartment; and the grave masks of the men lying there were similar during sleep and immobility. And in the jesters’ apartment, the laughter of their sleeping mouths had just the same width. And the immutable beauty of the women’s faces had not altered in repose; they had their arms crossed over their throats, or one hand under their heads, and they did not seem to care about their smile which was as graceful when they ignored it. At the end of the last room stretched a bronze bed, with high reliefs of bent women and giant flowers. The yellow cushions kept the imprint of a restless body. There should have rested, at this hour of the night, the king with the golden mask; there his ancestors had slept for years. And the king turned his head from his bed: They were able to sleep, he said, with this secret on their faces, and sleep came to kiss them on the forehead, like me. And they did not shake off their mask with the black face of sleep, to frighten it forever. And I brushed against this bronze, I touched these cushions where the limbs of these shameful ones once fell… And the king passed into the chamber of the brazier, where the pink and purple flame still danced, and threw its swift arms against the walls. And he struck on the great copper gong a blow so resounding that there was a vibration of all the metallic things around. The frightened guards rushed forward half-dressed, with their axes and steel balls bristling with spikes, and the priests appeared, asleep, letting their robes trail, and the jesters forgot all the sacramental bounds of entry, and the women showed their smiling faces at the corners of the doors . Now the king mounted his black throne and commanded: “I struck the gong to gather you for an important thing. The beggar spoke the truth. You are all deceiving me here. Take off your masks. ” A shiver could be heard in limbs and clothes and weapons. Then, slowly, those who were there made up their minds and uncovered their faces. Then the king with the golden mask turned to the priests and looked at fifty large laughing faces with small eyes stuck together by drowsiness; and, turning to the jesters, he examined fifty drooling figures hollowed by sadness with eyes bloody with insomnia; and, stooping towards the crescent of his seated women, he sneered,–for their faces were full of boredom and ugliness and coated with stupidity.– So, said the king, you have deceived me for so many years about yourselves and about everyone else. Those whom I believed to be serious and who gave me advice on divine and human matters are like wineskins swollen with wind or wine; and those whose continual gaiety I amused me with were sad to the bottom of their hearts; and your sphinx-like smile, O women, meant nothing at all! Wretched you are; but I am still the most miserable among you. I am a king and my face appears regal. Now, in reality, see: the most unfortunate in my kingdom has nothing to envy me. And the king removed his golden mask. And a cry rose from the throats of those who saw him; for the pink flame of the brazier illuminated his white leper scales. “It is they who deceived me—my fathers, I mean,” cried the king, ” who were lepers like me, and transmitted their disease to me with the royal inheritance. They deceived me, and they forced you to lie. ” Through the great bay of the hall, open to the sky, the falling moon showed its yellow mask. “So,” said the king, “this moon which always turns the same golden face towards us may have another dark and cruel face, so my royalty has been stretched over my leprosy. But I will no longer see the appearance of this world, and I will direct my gaze towards dark things. Here, before you, I punish myself for my leprosy, and for my lie, and my race with me. The king lifted his golden mask; and, standing on the black throne, amidst commotion and supplications, he drove the side hooks of the mask into his eyes, with a cry of anguish; for the last time, a red light bloomed before him, and a stream of blood flowed down his face, down his hands, down the dark steps of the throne. He tore his clothes, staggered down the steps, and, groping aside the guards, mute with horror, he set out alone into the night. Now the leprous and blind king walked in the night. He came up against the seven concentric walls of his seven courts, and against the ancient trees of the royal residence, and he caused wounds on his hands by touching the thorns of the hedges. When he heard his footsteps ringing, he knew he was on the highway. For hours and hours he walked, without even feeling the need to take food . He knew he was lit by the sun by the heat that veiled his face, and he recognized night by the cold of the darkness. The blood that had flowed from his torn out eyes covered his skin with a blackish, dry crust. And when he had walked for a long time, the blind king felt tired and sat down by the side of the road. He now lived in a dark world and his eyes had withdrawn into himself.
As he wandered in this dark plain of thoughts, he heard the sound of bells. At once he pictured the return of a flock of sheep with thick wool, led by rams whose fat tails hung to the ground. And he stretched out his hands to touch the white wool, not ashamed of the animals. But his hands met other tender hands, and a gentle voice said to him: “Poor blind man, what do you want?” And the king recognized the charming voice of a woman. “You must not touch me,” cried the king. “But where are your sheep?” Now the young girl who stood before him was a leper, and because of that wore bells hanging from her clothes. But she did not dare to admit it, and answered lying: “They are a little behind me. ” “Where are you going?” said the blind king. “I am returning,” she replied, “to the city of the Wretched.” Then the king remembered that there was, in a remote place in his kingdom, an asylum where those who had been rejected from life for their illnesses or their crimes took refuge. They existed in huts built by themselves or locked in dens dug in the ground. And their solitude was extreme. The king resolved to go to this city. “Lead me,” he said. The girl grabbed him by the hem of his sleeve. “Let me wash your face,” she said, “for the blood has been running down your cheeks for perhaps a week.” And the king trembled, thinking that she would be horrified by his leprosy and abandon him. But she poured water from her flask and washed the king’s face. Then she said: “Poor thing, how you must have suffered from having your eyes torn out! ” “How I suffered before, without knowing it,” said the king. “But come on. Will we arrive this evening at the city of Les Misérables? ” “I hope so,” said the girl. And she led him back, speaking tenderly to him. Meanwhile, the blind king heard the bells, and, turning around, wanted to stroke the sheep. And the girl was afraid that he would guess her illness. Now the king was exhausted from fatigue and hunger. She took a piece of bread from her bag and offered him her gourd. But he refused, fearing to contaminate the bread and the water. Then he asked: “Do you see the city of Les Misérables? ” “Not yet,” said the young girl. And they walked further. She picked some blue lotus for him, and he chewed it to refresh his mouth. The sun was setting toward the great rice paddies undulating on the horizon. “This is the scent of rest rising toward me,” said the blind king. Are we not approaching the city of Les Misérables? “Not yet,” said the girl. And, as the bloody disk of the sun still cut through the violet sky, the king swooned with weariness and starvation. At the end of the road trembled a thin column of smoke among grassy roofs. The mist of the marshes floated around it. “This is the city,” said the girl; “I see it. ” “I will enter another alone,” said the blind king. “I had only one desire left; I would have liked to rest my lips on yours, to refresh myself with your face which must be so beautiful. But I would have defiled you, since I am a leper.” And the king fainted in death. And the girl burst into tears, seeing that the face of the blind king was pure and limpid, and knowing well that she herself had feared to defile it. Now from the city of Les Misérables came an old beggar with a bristling beard , whose uncertain eyes trembled. “Why are you crying?” he said. And the young girl told him that the blind king had died, after having his eyes torn out, thinking he was a leper. “And he would not give me the kiss of peace,” she said, “so as not to defile me; and it is I who am truly a leper in the face of heaven.” And the old beggar answered her: “Doubtless the blood from his heart that had gushed through his eyes had cured his illness. And he died, thinking he had a miserable mask. But, at this hour, he has laid aside all masks, of gold, of leprosy, and of flesh.
” Chapter 2. THE DEATH OF ODJIGH. TO JH Rosny At that time the human race seemed close to perishing. The orb of the sun had the coldness of the moon. An eternal winter made the ground crack. The mountains that had arisen, vomiting the blazing entrails of the earth into the sky, were gray with icy lava. The lands were crisscrossed with parallel or star-shaped grooves; prodigious crevasses, suddenly opened, damaged the higher things with a collapse, and one saw long lines of erratic blocks moving towards them in a slow slide. The dark air was spangled with transparent needles; a sinister whiteness covered the countryside; the universal silver radiance seemed to sterilize the world. There was no longer any vegetation, except for a few traces of pale lichen on the rocks. The bones of the globe had stripped themselves of their flesh, which is made of earth, and the plains stretched out like skeletons . And winter death attacking first the lower life, the fish and the sea beasts had perished, imprisoned in the ice, then the insects that swarmed on the creeping plants, and the animals that carried their young in the pouches of their bellies, and the half-flying beings that had haunted the great forests; for as far as the eye could see, there were no more trees or vegetation, and nothing alive was to be found except what remained in caverns, grottoes or dens. Thus, among the children of men, two races were already extinct: those who had dwelt in the nests of vines, at the tops of the great trees, and those who had withdrawn to the center of the lakes in floating houses: forests, woods, coppices and bushes littered the sparkling ground, and the surface of the waters was hard and shining like polished stone. The Beast Hunters, who knew fire, the Troglodytes who knew how to dig the earth down to its inner warmth, and the Fish Eaters, who had stored up marine oil in their ice holes, still resisted the winter. But the beasts were becoming rare, seized by the frost as soon as their snouts reached the ground , and the wood for making fire was going to be exhausted, and the oil was as solid as a yellow rock with a white crest. However, a wolf killer, named Odjigh, who lived in a deep den and possessed a jade-green axe, immense, heavy and formidable, took pity on living things. Being on the edge of the great inland sea whose tip extends to the east of Minnesota, he cast his gaze towards the northern regions where the cold seemed to gather. At the bottom of his icy cave he took the sacred pipe carved from the white stone, filled it with fragrant marijuana from which the smoke rises in crowns, and blew the divine incense into the air. The crowns rose towards the sky and the gray spire inclined to the North. It was towards the North that Odjigh, the wolf-killer, marched. covered his face with a fur-lined raccoon skin pierced with holes, whose plume-like tail swung above his head, tied around his waist with a leather strap a pouch full of finely chopped dry meat mixed with fat, and, swinging his green jade axe, he headed towards the thick clouds piled up on the horizon. He passed, and around him life was dying out. The rivers had long since fallen silent. The opaque air brought only muffled sounds. The icy masses, blue, white and green, radiant with frost, seemed like the pillars of a monumental road. Odjigh missed in his heart the wriggling of the pearl- colored fish among the meshes of the free-diving nets, and the serpentine swimming of the sea eels, and the ponderous gait of the turtles, and the oblique course of the gigantic crabs with squinty eyes, and the lively yawns of the land beasts, fur-covered beasts with flat beaks and clawed feet, beasts clad in scales, beasts spotted in various ways that pleased the eyes, beasts in love with their young, with agile leaps, or singular whirls, or perilous flights. And above all animals, he missed the ferocious wolves and their gray furs, and their familiar howls, having accustomed to hunting them with the club and the stone axe, on misty nights, by the red light of the moon. Now, on his left, there appeared a den-beast that lives deep in the ground and lets itself be pulled backwards from holes, a Badger, a person of any body type, with disheveled fur. Odjigh saw it and rejoiced, without thinking of killing it. The Badger, keeping his distance, advanced abreast with it.
Then, on Odjigh’s right, suddenly emerged from an icy passage a poor Lynx with fathomless eyes. It looked sideways at Odjigh fearfully and crawled anxiously. But the wolf-killer rejoiced again, walking between the Badger and the Lynx. As it advanced, its meat pouch beating against its side, it heard behind it a faint howl of hunger. And turning around as if at the sound of a familiar voice, it saw a bony Wolf following sadly. Odjigh felt sorry for all those whose skulls he had split open. The Wolf stuck out its smoking tongue, and its eyes were red. So the killer continued on his way with his animal companions, the Subterranean Badger on his left, and the Lynx who sees everything on earth on his right, and the Wolf with the hungry belly behind him. They arrived in the middle of the inland sea, which was distinguished from the mainland only by the vast green color of its ice. And there Odjigh, the wolf killer, sat down on a block and placed the stone pipe before it. And before each of his living companions, he placed a block of ice which he hollowed out with the angle of his axe, similar to the sacred censer where smoke is blown. Into the four pipes he packed the fragrant marijuanas; then he struck the stones which create fire against each other ; and the marijuanas lit up, and four thin columns of smoke rose towards the sky. Now the gray spire which rose before the Badger inclined towards the West; and the one that rose before the Lynx bent toward the East, and the one that rose before the Wolf made an arc toward the South. But the gray coil of Odjigh’s pipe rose toward the North. The wolf-killer set off again. And, looking to the left, he was saddened: for the Badger who sees underground was turning aside toward the West; and, looking to the right, he regretted the Lynx, who sees everything on earth and who was fleeing towards the East. He thought indeed that these two animal companions were prudent and wise, each in the domain assigned to him. Nevertheless, he walked boldly, having behind him the hungry Wolf, with red eyes, whom he pitied. The cold, destitute mass located to the North, seemed to touch the sky. The winter was becoming even more cruel, Odjigh’s feet were bleeding, cut by the ice and his blood was freezing into black crusts. But he advanced for hours, days, weeks no doubt, months perhaps, sucking a little dried meat, throwing the debris to his companion the Wolf who followed him. Odjigh walked with a confused hope. He pitied the world of men, animals, and plants, which was perishing, and he felt strong to fight against the cause of the cold. And, at last, his path was stopped by an immense barrier of ice which closed the dark dome of the sky, like a chain of mountains with invisible peaks. The great ice floes which plunged into the solid sheet of the Ocean were of a limpid green; then they became cloudy in their heaps; and as they rose, they appeared of an opaque blue, similar to the color of the sky in the beautiful days of old: for they were made of fresh water and snow. Odjigh seized his axe of green jade, and cut steps into the escarpments. He thus rose slowly to a prodigious height, where it seemed to him that his head was enveloped in clouds and that the earth had fled. And on the step, just below him, the Wolf sat and waited confidently. When he thought he had reached the crest, he saw that it was formed of a vertical, sparkling blue wall, and that no one could go beyond it. But he looked behind him, and he saw the hungry living beast. The pity of the animated world gave him strength. He plunged his jade axe into the blue wall, and dug the ice. The shards flew around him, multicolored. He dug for hours and hours. His limbs were yellow and wrinkled with cold. His pouch of meat had long since withered. He had chewed the fragrant marijuana of the pipe, to stave off his hunger, and, suddenly disbelieving the Higher Powers, he had thrown the pipe into the depths with the two fire-making stones. He dug. He heard a sharp creaking and cried out: for he knew that this noise came from the blade of his jade axe, which the excessive cold would split. Then he lifted it up and, having nothing left to warm it, he thrust it powerfully into his right thigh. The green axe was stained with warm blood. And Odjigh dug into the blue wall again . The wolf, sitting behind him, licked the red drops that rained down with a moan. And suddenly the polished wall burst. There was an immense blast of heat, as if the warm seasons were accumulated on the other side, at the barrier of the sky. The opening widened and the strong breath surrounded Odjigh. He heard all the little shoots of Spring rustling, and he felt Summer blazing. In the great current that lifted him up, it seemed to him that all the seasons were returning to the world to save general life from death by ice. The current carried the white rays of the sun, and the warm rains , and the caressing breezes, and the clouds laden with fertility. And in the breath of warm life the black clouds gathered and engendered fire. There was a long streak of flame with the crash of lightning, and the bright line struck Odjigh in the heart, like a red sword. He fell against the polished wall, his back turned to the world towards which the Seasons were returning in the river of the storm, and the hungry Wolf, climbing timidly, his paws resting on his shoulders, began to gnaw at his neck. Chapter 3. EARTHLY FIRE. To Paul Claudel. The last surge of faith that had swept the world along had not been able to save it. New prophets had arisen in vain. The mysteries of the will had been uselessly forced; for it no longer mattered to direct it, but it was its quantity that seemed to be diminishing. The energy of all living beings was declining. It had been concentrated in a supreme effort toward a future religion, and the effort had not succeeded. Everyone retreated into a very mild egotism. All passions were tolerated. The earth was as if in a warm lull. Vices grew there with the unconsciousness of large poisonous plants. Immorality, become the very law of things, with the god Chance of Life; science obscured by mystical superstition; the hypocrisy of the heart to which the senses served as tentacles; the seasons, once demarcated, now mixed in a series of rainy days, which brooded over the storm; nothing precise, nor traditional, but a confusion of old things, and the reign of the vague. It was then that on a night of electricity, the signal of devastation seemed to fall from the sky. An unknown storm blew from above, engendered by the corruption of the earth. The cold and the heat, the sunlight and the snow, the rains and the rays combined had given birth to forces of destruction which suddenly burst forth. For an extraordinary fall of aerolites became visible and the night was streaked with dazzling shafts; the stars blazed like torches, and the clouds were messengers of fire and the moon a red brazier vomiting multicolored projectiles. All things were penetrated by a pale light, which illuminated the last recesses, and whose dazzling light, although subdued, gave a prodigious pain. Then the night that had opened closed again. From all the volcanoes sprang columns of ash toward the sky, like spirals of black basalt, pillars of a super-terrestrial world. There was a rain of dark dust in the opposite direction, and a cloud emanated from the earth, which covered the earth. Thus passed the night and the dawn was invisible. A gigantic dark red stain crossed the ash of the sky from east to west. The atmosphere became burning and the air was pockmarked with black dots that clung everywhere. The crowds were prostrate on the ground, not knowing where to flee. The bells of the churches, convents and monasteries rang uncertainly , as if struck by supernatural clappers. There were sometimes detonations in the forts, where the siege guns fired water cannons, trying to clear the air. Then, as the red globe touched the West and a day had passed, general silence fell. No one had the strength to pray or supplicate anymore. And the incandescent mass crossing the black horizon, the whole western part of the sky burst into flames, and a sheet of fire retrograded along the ancient path of the sun. There was a flight before the celestial and terrestrial conflagration. Two poor little bodies let themselves slide down a low window and ran wildly. Despite the stains of the corrupted air, she was very blond, with limpid eyes; he, golden-skinned, with a transparent curtain of curls, where the singular gleams cast violet rays. They knew nothing, neither of them; they had barely left the confines of childhood, and living as neighbors, had the affection of brother and sister. Thus, holding hands, they crossed the black streets, where the roofs and chimneys seemed rubbed with sinister light, among the sprawling men and the horses that lay quivering, then the outer walls, the depopulated suburbs, going towards the east, in the opposite direction of the flame. They were stopped by a river which suddenly barred their passage, and whose waters flowed quickly. But there was a boat on the bank: they pushed it and got into it threw it, letting it go with the current. The boat was seized at the keel by the tide, at the sides by the hurricane and flew off like a stone thrown from a sling. It was a very old fishing boat, browned and polished by friction, whose oarlocks were worn by the force of oars and whose gunwales were shiny from the passage of nets, like the primitive and honest tool of the civilization that was perishing. They lay down at the bottom, still holding hands, and trembling before the unknown. And the fast boat took them towards a mysterious sea, fleeing under the hot storm that swirled. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They awoke on a desolate ocean. Their boat was surrounded by mounds of pale seaweed, where the foam had left its dried slime, where iridescent creatures and pink starfish were rotting. The small waves bore the white bellies of dead fish. Half the sky was veiled by the spread of the fire , which was advancing noticeably and eating away at the ashen fringe of the other half. It seemed to them that the sea was dead, like the rest. For its breath was foul, and its translucency was crisscrossed with veins of deep blue and green. Meanwhile, the boat glided across its surface with a movement that did not slow down. The eastern horizon had bluish gleams. She dipped her hand in the water, and withdrew it immediately: the waves were already hot. A frightening boiling was perhaps about to make the ocean tremble. To the south, they saw peaks of white clouds with pink tufts, and did not know if it was not a fiery vapor. The general silence and the growing flame froze them in stupor: they preferred the great cry that had accompanied them, like the echo of a death rattle totaled in the wind. The end of the sea, where the dome of ashes had plunged, still half-dark, was opened by a clear struggle of sanity. A portion of a circle of livid blue seemed to promise the entrance to a new world. “Ah! look!” she said. The light mist that floated behind them on the ocean had just lit up with the same glow as the sky, pale and flickering: it was the sea that was burning. Why this universal destruction? Their heads, which beat inwardly in the overheated air, were full of this multiplied question. They did not know. They were unconscious of faults. Life gripped them; they lived faster, all of a sudden; adolescence seized them in the midst of the burning of the world. And, in this ancient boat, in this first instrument of the lower life, they were such a young Adam and such a little Eve, sole survivors of the earthly Hell. The sky was a dome on fire. There was nothing left on the horizon but a single extreme blue point, on which the eyelid of flame was about to close . A roaring sea was already reaching them. She stood up and undressed. Naked, their polished and slender limbs were lit by the universal glow. They took each other’s hands and embraced. “Let us love each other,” she said. Chapter 4. THE EMBALMERS. To Alphonse Daudet. That there are still in Libya, on the borders of Ethiopia where very old and very wise men live, sorceries more mysterious than those of the Thessalian sorceresses, I cannot doubt. It is terrible, indeed, to think that women’s incantations can make the moon descend into a mirror case, or plunge it, when full, into a silver bucket, with dipped stars, or fry it like a yellow sea jellyfish, in a pan, while the Thessalian night is black and men who shed their skins are free to wander; all this is terrible; but I would fear these things less than to meet again in the blood-colored desert, Libyan embalmers. My brother Ophelion and I had crossed the nine circles of diverse sands that surround Ethiopia. There are terrestrial dunes that, in the distance, appear glaucous like the sea or azure like lakes. The Pygmies do not reach these expanses; but we had left them in the great dark forests, where the sun never penetrates; and the copper-colored men who feed on human flesh and recognize one another by the sound of their jaws are further away to the west. The red desert we were entering to go towards Libya is to all appearances bare of cities and men. We walked seven days and seven nights. In this region, the night is transparent and blue, fresh and dangerous to the eyes, so much so that sometimes this blue nocturnal clarity swells the pupils in the space of six hours and the sick person no longer sees the sun rise. Such is the nature of this disease, that it attacks only those who sleep on the sand and do not veil their faces; but those who walk night and day have only to fear the white powder of the desert which irritates the eyelids under the sun. On the evening of the eighth day we saw on the blood-colored plain small white domes arranged in a circle, and Ophelion thought it would be useful to examine them. Night was falling quickly, as is customary in the Libyan country, and when we approached, it was very dark. These domes emerged from the ground, and at first we could not recognize any openings in them; but when we had crossed the circle which they formed, we saw that they were pierced by doors which were as high as a man of average height and which were all directed towards the center of the circle. The opening of these doors was dark; but through very narrow orifices pierced around it passed rays that marked our faces as if with long red fingers. We were also surrounded by an odor that we did not know and that seemed mixed with perfumes and corruption. Ophelion stopped me and told me that someone was beckoning to us in one of these domes. A woman whom we could not see distinctly was standing under the door and inviting us. I hesitated, but Ophelion drew me towards her. The entrance was dark, as was the round room under the dome; and, as soon as we were inside, the one who had called us disappeared. We heard a soft voice uttering barbarous words. Then this woman stood before us again, carrying a smoky clay lamp. We greeted her and she welcomed us in our Greek language, which she spoke with a Libyan accent. She showed us beds of baked earth, decorated with figures of naked men and birds, and made us sit down. Then, saying that she was going to get our meal, she disappeared again, without our being able to see, by the faint light of the lamp which was placed on the ground, by which she came out. This woman had black hair, and dark-colored eyes; she was dressed in a linen tunic; a blue belt supported her breasts, and she smelled of earth. The supper which she served us in earthenware dishes and cups of dark glass was of bread in wreaths, with figs and salted fish; there was no other meat except preserved locusts; as for the wine, it was pink and pale, apparently mixed with water, and of an exquisite flavor. She ate with us, but touched neither the fish nor the locusts. And as long as I was in this dome, I did not see her put any flesh into her mouth; She was content with a little bread and preserved fruit. The reason for this abstinence is doubtless a disgust that will be easily understood from this story; and perhaps the perfumes among which this woman lived took away her need for food and soothed her with their subtle particles. She questioned us little, and we hardly dared to speak to her; for her customs seemed strange. After supper, we lay down on our beds; she left us a lamp and prepared another smaller one for herself; then she left us, and I saw that she entered below ground through an opening at the opposite end of the dome. Ophelion seemed little willing to answer my conjectures, and I fell into an uneasy sleep until the middle of the night. I was awakened by the sound of the lamp crackling, because the wick had burned down to the oil, and I no longer saw my brother Ophelion near me. I got up and called to him in a low voice; but he was no longer in the dome. Then I went out into the night, and it seemed to me that I heard lamentations and cries of mourners underground. This echoing sound quickly died away: I went around the domes without discovering anything. But there was a sort of trembling, as of work in the earth, and in the distance the sad call of the wild dog. I approached one of the orifices from which the red rays were gushing forth, and I managed to climb onto one of the domes, to look inside. I understood then the strangeness of the country and of the city of domes. For the place that I saw, lit by torches, was strewn with the dead; and among the mourners, other women hurried with vases and instruments. I saw them slitting fresh bellies on the side and pulling out the yellow, brown, green , and blue intestines, which they plunged into amphorae, driving a silver hook through the noses of the figures, breaking the delicate bones at the root and bringing out the brains with spatulas, washing the bodies with dyed waters, rubbing them with perfumes of Rhodes, myrrh, and cinnamon, braiding the hair, erasing the colored eyelashes and eyebrows, painting the teeth and hardening the lips, polishing the fingernails and toenails and surrounding them with a line of gold. Then, with the belly flat, the navel hollow, in the center of circular wrinkles, they stretched out the fingers of the dead, white and wrinkled, encircled their wrists and ankles with electron rings, and patiently rolled them in long linen bandages. All these domes were apparently a city of embalmers, where the dead were brought from the surrounding towns. And in some of the dwellings the work was carried out above, but in others below ground. The sight of a body with its lips pressed together, between which a sprig of myrtle was passed, like women who cannot smile and want to accustom themselves to showing their teeth, horrified me. I resolved, as soon as day came, to flee, with Ophelion, the city of embalmers. And, returning to our dome, I replaced a wick in the lamp, and lit it in the hearth, under the vault: but Ophelion had not returned. I went to the end of the room, and I lit the opening of the underground staircase; and from below I heard a sound of kisses. Then I smiled at the thought that my brother was spending an amorous night with a handler of corpses. But I did not know what to think when I saw the woman who received us enter under the dome, through an opening that undoubtedly led into a corridor made inside the cement wall . She went towards the staircase and listened, as I had done. Then she turned towards me and her face frightened me. Her eyebrows touched, and she seemed to go back into the wall. I fell into a deep sleep again. In the morning, Ophelion was lying on the bed next to mine. His face was the color of ashes. I shook him and urged him to leave. He looked at me without recognizing me. The woman came in, and as I questioned her, she spoke of a pestilential wind that had blown over my brother. All day long, he turned on his sides, agitated by the fever, and the woman looked at him with fixed eyes. Towards evening, he moved his lips and died. I kissed his knees, groaning, and I wept until two hours after midnight. Then my soul flew away with dreams. The pain of having lost Ophelion troubled me and made me wake up. His body was no longer with me and the woman had disappeared. Then I cried out and ran through the room, but I could not find the staircase. I left the dome and, going up to the red ray, I applied my eyes to the opening. Now this is what I saw: The body of my brother Ophelion was lying among vases and jars; and his brain had been removed with the hook and the silver spatulas , and his belly was open. Already his nails were gilded and his skin rubbed with asphalt. But he was between two embalmers who resembled each other so strangely that I could not distinguish which one had received us. Both were weeping and tearing their faces, and kissing my brother Ophelion, and holding him in their arms. And I called through the opening of the dome, and I looked for the entrance to this underground room, and I ran towards the other domes; but I received no answer, and I wandered uselessly in the transparent and blue night. And my thought was that these two embalmers were sisters and magicians and jealous, and that they had killed my brother Ophelion to keep his beautiful body. I covered my head with my cloak and I fled in a panic from this land of spells. Chapter 5. THE PLAGUE. To Auguste Bréal CCCCI e mille l’an corant Nella città di Trento Rè Rupert Voile lo scudo mio esser copert De l’arme suo Lion d’or rampant. CRONICA DEL PITTI. I, Bonacorso de Neri de Pitti, son of Bonacorso, gonfalonier of justice of the commune of Florence, whose shield was covered in the year fourteen hundred and first, by order of King Rupert, in the city of Trent, with the rampant Golden Lion, I wish to relate for my ennobled descendants what happened to me when I began to travel the world in search of adventure. In the year MCCLXXIV, being a young man without money, I fled from Florence on the highways, with Matteo as my companion. For the plague was devastating the city. The illness was sudden, and attacked in the street. The eyes became burning and red, the throat hoarse; the belly swelled. Then the mouth and tongue were covered with small pockets full of irritating water. One was possessed by thirst. A dry cough shook the sick for several hours. Then the limbs stiffened at the joints; The skin was covered with red, swollen spots, which some call buboes. And finally, the dead had distended and whitish faces, with bleeding bruises and their mouths open like a cornet. The public fountains, almost exhausted by the heat, were surrounded by bent men and people of all types of bodies who tried to plunge their heads into them. Several rushed in, and they were pulled out by the hooks of the chains, black with mud and with shattered skulls. The browning corpses littered the middle of the roads through which, in the season, the torrent of rains flows; the smell was unbearable and the fear was terrible. But Matteo being a great dice player, we made ourselves merry as soon as we left the city and we drank at the nearest inn wine mixed for our salvation from mortality. There were merchants from Genoa and Pavia there; and we challenged them, dice in hand, and Matteo won twelve ducats. For my part, I invited them to the game of tables, where I had the good fortune to win twenty gold florins, from which ducats and florins we bought mules and a load of wool, and Matteo, who had deliberated to go to Prussia, stocked up on saffron. We traveled the roads from Padua to Verona, we returned to Padua, to provide ourselves with more wool, and we traveled as far as Venice. From there, crossing the sea, we entered Sclavonia, and visited the good cities as far as the borders of the Croats. At Buda, I fell sick with a fever, and Matteo left me alone at the inn, with twelve ducats, returning to Florence where certain matters called him, and where I was to come to join him. I lay in a dry and dusty room , on a sack of straw, without a doctor, and the door open onto the drinking room. On the night of Saint Martin, a company of fifes and flutists came, with some fifteen or sixteen Venetian and Teutonic soldiers. After emptying many flagons, crushing the tin cups and breaking the jugs against the walls, they began to dance to the sound of the fife. They passed through the door their faces red, and seeing me lying on my sack, began to pull me into the room, shouting: Either you will drink, or you will die! then they tricked me, while the fever was pounding in my head, and finally plunged me into the straw of the sack, the opening of which they tied around my neck. I sweated profusely, and my fever was no doubt dissipated, while anger came to me. My arms were entangled and my basilar had been removed , otherwise I would have rushed, bristling with straw, among the soldiers. But I wore at my belt, under my breeches, a short sheathed blade; I managed to slip my hand there, and with it, I slit the canvas of the sack. Perhaps the fever was still inflaming my brain; but the memory of the plague which we had left in Florence and which had since spread to Sclavonia, mingled in my mind with a sort of idea which I had formed of the face of Sulla, the dictator of the Latins, of whom the great Cicero speaks. It resembled, the Athenians said, a blackberry dusted with flour. I resolved to terrify the Venetian and Teutonic men-at-arms; and as I found myself in the middle of the closet where the innkeeper kept his provisions and preserved fruit , I quickly ripped open a pouch full of corn flour. I rubbed my face with this dust; and, when it had taken on a color that was neither yellow nor white, I made a scratch on my arm with my blade, from which I drew enough blood to irregularly stain the plaster. Then I went back into the sack, and waited for the drunken bandits. They came laughing and staggering: scarcely had they seen my white and bleeding head than they clashed together, shouting: The plague! The plague! I had not taken up my weapons again, and the inn was empty. Feeling recovered from the sweating these ruffians had forced upon me, I set out for Florence to join Matteo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I found my companion Matteo wandering through the Florentine countryside, and in rather bad shape. He had not dared to enter the city, because of the plague which continued to rage there. We retraced our steps and headed, in search of fortune, towards the States of Pope Gregory. As we went up towards Avignon, we encountered bands of armed men, carrying lances, pikes and spears; for the citizens of Bologna had just revolted against the Pope, at the request of those of Florence (which we were unaware of). There we played merry games with the people of both parties , both at tables and at dice, so that we won about three hundred ducats and eighty gold florins. The city of Bologna was almost empty of men, and we were received in the baths with shouts of joy. The rooms there are not strewn with straw as in many Lombard cities; there is no lack of pallets , although most of the straps are broken. Matteo met a Florentine acquaintance of his, Monna Giovanna; for I, who had not thought to inquire the name of mine, was pleased. There we drank abundantly, both thick wine of the country and ale , and we ate preserves and tartlets. Matteo, to whom I had told my adventure, pretending to go into retirement, went down to the kitchens, and came back dressed as a plague victim. The girls in the steam rooms fled in all directions, uttering shrill cries, then they reassured themselves, and came to touch Matteo’s face, still fearful. Monna Giovanna did not want to return with him, and remained trembling in a corner, saying that he smelled of fever. Meanwhile, Matteo, drunk, laid his head among the pots, on the table that his snoring made tremble, and he resembled the colorful wooden figures that the bankers show on the platforms. Finally we left Bologna, and after various adventures, we arrived near Avignon, where we learned that the Pope was having all the Florentines imprisoned, and had them and their books burned to avenge the rebellion. But we were warned too late; for the sergeants of the Pope’s Marshal surprised us during the night, and threw us into the prison of Avignon. Before being questioned, we were examined by a judge and provisionally condemned to the lower dungeon, pending investigation, with dry bread and water, which is the custom of ecclesiastical justice. I managed, however, to hide under my robe our canvas bag, which contained a little polenta and some olives. The floor of the dungeon was marshy; and we had no air except through a grilled air vent which opened at ground level onto the courtyard of the Conciergerie. Our feet were passed through the holes of very heavy wooden stocks , our hands tied with rather loose chains, in such a way that our bodies touched from the knee to the shoulder. The usher at the wicket did us the favor of telling us that we were suspected of poison; for the Pope had learned from certain ambassadors that the gonfaloniers of the commune of Florence were entertaining the intention of having him killed. We were thus in the darkness of the prison, hearing no sound, not knowing the time of day or night, in great danger of being burned. I then remembered our stratagem; and the idea came to us that papal justice, through fear of illness, would have us thrown out. I reached my polenta with difficulty, and it was agreed that Matteo would smear his face with it and stain himself with blood, while I shouted to attract the henchmen. Matteo arranged his mask, and began to howl hoarsely, as if his throat were blocked. I invoked Our Lady while shaking my chains. But the dungeon was deep, the gate thick, and it was dark. For several hours we pleaded in vain. I stopped my cries: however, Matteo continued to moan. I nudged him with my elbow, so that he would rest until day: his moans became louder. I touched him in the darkness: my hands only reached his belly, which seemed to me swollen like a wineskin. And then fear seized me: but I was pressed against him. And while he cried in a hoarse voice: Drink! Drink! until it seemed to me I heard the desperate call of a hound let loose, the pale circle of dawn fell from the air vent. And then the cold sweat trickled down my limbs; for, beneath his powdery mask, beneath the stains of dried blood, I saw that he was livid and I recognized the white scabs and the red oozing of the plague of Florence. Chapter 6. THE FALSE FACES. To Paul Arène. The truces concluded at Tours by Charles VII, King of France, with Henry VI, King of England, had broken up the armies. The men of battle were on the fields, having neither pay nor provisions from military plunder. The Flayers, Armagnacs, Gascons, Lombards, Scots, were returning in bands from the terrible battle of Saint-Jacques, and they had roasted the legs of the peasants all along their route. It was now November 1444. The countryside was snowy and the trees black. Along the roads passed lines of men in torn doublets, in dark jackets with no one of any body type, with roulets on their hoods and frilly cornets attached to red aiguillettes; some wore iron hats, all walked with their headscarves on their shoulders, holding guisarmes, or crested planches, or ox tongues at their belts. The inns were desolate. For they went down after the maid who drew the wine, and dipped her head in the pipe, stole the red hoods lying on the tables among the pots, carried off the pewter bowls, and, smashing the women’s chests, took their silver rosaries and their golden rods. Crossing the towns as rarely as they could, they rushed to the baths, gagged the mistress, threw straw out of the windows, forced the little girls onto the chests, and, twisting the door keys in their obscene locks, left in a tumult by the light of the lanterns. The syndic and the watchmen, archers and crossbowmen, gathered in a black mass, watched them flee, terrified. Usually they preferred the common little girls sitting at the gates of good towns, in the evening, at the edge of cemeteries. They wore only a coat and a shirt; they rested their feet on the tombstones, and the moon made them appear white. They climbed onto the blocks and called to each other: Denise! Marion! Museau! They slept in the air, between the pits, in the stagnant water. They dreamed of the straw-strewn floor of the steam baths, in some dark street. The road watchmen, rent-beaters, spyers and fake battle men, took them away for a while, and sometimes did not cut their throats. They were seen passing between two strange men -at-arms, who held them under the arms and crossed vaults over their heads. Among all the jesters, fiddlers, and hurdy-gurdy players, there also came a few vagabonds who had been clerics, and, having nothing to change their clothes, tore the collars of their doublets and put on a gorgia. They led one or two poor children whose legs they had sawn off near the feet and gouged out their eyes, which they displayed to arouse the pity of passers-by while they played the hurdy- gurdy. When a troop had gathered around them, they pretended to be affected by the decrepit disease, fell on their backs, beat the earth with their temples and hands, and foamed at the mouth while swearing bloody damnation. And meanwhile their friends cut off the bitings of belts, and took away the women’s books of hours to take the clasps. Then, in the month of November, mysterious nocturnal figures arrived after these stragglers . No one knew what was going on. They were variously dressed, some wearing black doublets and red hats, almusses lined with small vair, others, vermilion silk cloaks and hoods with green silk cornets, some appearing to be lords, in long black velvet robes, lined with sable, some appearing to be women in disguise, in purple caps with a bib. All were armed, several having belts and hauberks. But these men of the night were distinguished from the others by a terrifying and unknown habit: they had their faces covered with false faces. Now these false faces were black, snub-nosed, with red lips, or bearing long arched beaks, or bristling with sinister mustaches, or leaving variegated beards hanging over the collar, or crossing the face with a single dark band between the mouth and the eyebrows, or resembling a wide sleeve of a jacket tied at the top, with holes through which the eyes and teeth could be seen. The people immediately gave these men the name of False Faces; nothing like this had ever been seen in the flat country; only a few nobles, the fashion having come from Italy, wore false faces made of rich metals in ceremonies. These people spread around Creully where Mathew Gough, an Englishman, was lord, and ravaged the region in a horrible way. These False Faces killed cruelly, disemboweling women, spearing children with pitchforks, cooking men on large spits for their to make the hiding places of money confess, painting the corpses with blood to bait the farms and reduce them with fear. They had with them little girls taken along the cemeteries, who could be heard screaming in the night. No one knew if they spoke. They emerged from the mystery and massacred in silence. It was suspected that there were nobles among them, who had betrayed the King of France, or the King of England, or both. Their ferocity was lordly. The terror was increased by it. People were examined by day, not knowing if they were becoming False-Face Men by night. There were patrols of men-at-arms through the countryside. Mathew Gough’s archers, determined men, watched for the False-Face Men and seized some. They were brought to the judge of Creully and questioned. None of them were recognized. They seemed to be from different countries. They gave their leader the name of king, and among them called him Alain Blanc-Bâton. Mathew Gough had them hung from the trees along the roads, with their false faces and rich clothing. The people came to see them, swaying in the wind, like strangely colored birds. Beasts of prey perched on the backs of their necks and tore at the flesh beneath their masks. Thus, many roads in Normandy were lined, halfway up the trees, with these varied and terrifying faces of leather, cloth, wood, or iron, which clashed together in the north wind. Meanwhile, the arrival of Lord Alan Blankbate, Captain of Rouen and Bayeux, was announced . The people of the castle put on their finest attire for the reception. Everything was in motion in the square of Creully. Mathew Gough wore a scarlet robe, a green hat, and fur-lined gloves. The jailer went up into the great hall. He touched Mathew Gough’s arm with his rod. They had just captured, he said, the one the False-Faces called Alain Blanc-Bâton. He refused to answer and they had not been able to unmask him. Then the usher spoke a few words in Mathew Gough’s ear, who stood up, put on the gold false face he had ready for the ceremony, and went down the steps of the tiled room where the torture was administered. There were three men there, one lying on the trestle. His chest and legs were bare, covered with blond hair. His false face was made of black leather, and water was poured through a cone through the hole in his mouth. His neck was wet and swollen: the muscles were twisting there. His back was arched. A pool spread over the tiles near the trestle. But the patient said nothing. They tied him to a bench with two sticks placed in the shape of a St. Andrew’s cross; and to each of his limbs the two tormentors put a rotating pivot which they turned and twisted. The bones of his wrists and ankles could be heard cracking. The man did nothing but groan. One of the tormentors went to fetch some embers from an earthenware bowl, and, straddling the man, blew the sparks onto his skin through the nostrils of the false face. The patient stirred and struggled, then remained motionless. Mathew Gough, believing him to be suffocated, signaled that he be carried to the kitchen fire. He seemed to revive there and breathed gently. Then Mathew Gough, his face covered with his golden false face which glittered in the flame, leaned towards the black false face and spoke in a low voice. He spoke English, and the tormentors did not understand. They saw the prisoner’s arms and legs tremble . But he made no reply, and remained silent beneath his false, dark face. Mathew Gough immediately had the rope placed around his neck, and the two tormentors hauled him up and pulled him by a ring set in the ceiling tiles. At the kitchen fire, he cast his agitated shadow upon the walls. Then, slowly ascending the steps, Mathew Gough ordered the place to be put in a state of defense, having received news, he said, of treason, and to take off the ceremonial clothes because Lord Alan Blankbate, captain of Rouen and Bayeux, had sent him a sure messenger that he would not come. The squires, archers, and footmen ran here and there, and the whole place rang with the clashing of ironwork. Thus perished in somber fashion the leader of the False-Face, to whom his companions gave the name of Alain Blanc-Bâton. Chapter 7. THE EUNUCHS. To Maurice Spronck. Spadones! They were squatting on the flagstones, knees together, and rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver-headed canes . Their saffron-colored robes were spread around them, and a scent of cinnamon emanated from their skin. So they rested among sweating steam-bath boys, men dressed in scarlet plush who were going to the baths with nets full of green playing balls, young men in red tunics with cherry-colored belts, tucked up tops, and long hair, runners with collars preceding sedan chairs, where matrons with twisted hair and polished skin returned the greetings of passersby. The upper part of the sky was warmly blue, veiled with pink filaments and gradually melted on the horizon into a transparent yellow, a very pale turquoise blue, and a delicate and trembling green. There were still street criers offering snow water: aqua nivata, nivata! Curly-haired Ethiopians everywhere sprinkled water from tiny pierced skins, similar to those used to pour down the red powder from the arena, in the amphitheater. Now, amidst the buzzing air, the eunuchs began to think of the country from which they had come, of burning Syria, and of Iberia with its silver mines. They had run at fifteen years of age through the high pastures, people of all types of bodies with the goats and the billy-goats, churning the milk, pressing hard white cheeses , which they pierced with a sprig of broom. They had loved little girls with large straw hats. They watched for them among the bouquets of golden flowers, when they were coming, and carved whistles for them from elder wood. Often they brought chickpeas that they had stolen from the barns. On those days, they dug a hole with their hands and threw in twigs and dry leaves. The little girl would go to the nearest hearth to fetch a burning ember; she put it in her flat clog, which she shook constantly as she ran, to prevent the coal from going out. Then, gravely seated facing each other, they roasted their chickpeas on the end of a pointed stick. Or they played king and queen. They made a throne with smooth stones, somewhere in the shade. The queen sat there, and the king went on an expedition to watch over his goats. The queen, after listening to the cicadas, fell asleep on her throne. Then, when the king returned, he made her a pillow of moss and gently spread her on it. In the evening, the shadows lengthened, and they went down with the goats along the bramble-lined paths. Bats flew from the bushes. Under the marijuana plants, they heard the rustling of a snake about to find its hole; the cricket sang in the last golden flames of the dying day; the rocks turned gray, and the first shiver of night shook the foliage of the trees. A fresh wind billowed the goats’ coats and rustled their fur; the dog, nose in the air, sniffed the fragrant breath, and the broom, swaying its yellow heads, undulated like the waves of the sea. Lower down, the rabbits fled into the undergrowth, and darkness gathered around the old oaks. Soon the hut was there, the mother at the door, with her spoon in her hand. Where were they, lords of the sky, those Spanish undergrowths, and the mountain hut, and the friendly flock? They had come, the tough Italiots, with shaved heads and tight lips; they had burned the hut and eaten the flock. They had taken the little ones from the heights near Osca. Along the Cinca, the soldiers had descended and crossed the plain of Sourdao to take them to Ilerda. And from Ilerda to Tarraco, across the black mountains of Iakketa and Ilercao. At Tarraco, merchants had made them drink an infusion of poppy seeds, to mutilate them painlessly. They had been loaded like cattle and sold at the ports of call, at Populonia, Cosa, or Alsium. Others had come to Rome, via Ostia. Mangos had bought them, coated their feet with chalk dust, and put white fleece caps on their heads. They had been rubbed with turpentine, plucked with a lamp and tongs , and curled with an iron. They had been displayed on a scaffold, with signs. They had white teeth and black eyes, spoke Latin with a guttural accent and a high-pitched tone. They were smoked with gagate, before paying the price, to see if they did not fall ill with epilepsy. Now, among the lifters of the veils of the gates, preservers of silver dishes, bathers, perfumers, cooks, dressers, waiters, tasters, cupbearers, porters in green robes, muleteers with tunics raised, waterers, chair slaves, bearers of fans and umbrellas, they were eunuchs, subjected to the pitchfork, the whip, and the public tortures of the Esquiline Gate. Their mistresses made them swell their cheeks to give them a slap, and the housekeepers pricked their necks with head needles. And they necessarily went through the Tuscus Vicus, where the debauched stroll , to buy fabrics and look for small nard amphorae, sealed with gypsum, from the pigment merchants, who sell hemlock, aconite, mandrake and cantharides. They sang in the atrium, at the first course, passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey and at dessert verses from the Book of Elephantis. They gazed painfully at paintings showing Atalanta with Meleager. Some guests kissed them as they passed, and they suffered from it. Despite their fringed laticlaves, their gold rings with iron stars, their bracelets of ivory set with metal, they looked with envy at the naked, black-lipped Libyans. They played nonchalantly on tablets of terebinth wood with stones of painted crystal. They barely ate fat fig-beaks surrounded by peppered egg yolk. Nothing could distract them from a weak sadness , neither the whims of the master nor those of the mistress. Drunk on pink wine, they ran beyond the butcher’s stalls with the bloody goats adorned with myrtle, beyond the popinae of roasters selling fried nuts and honeyed chard, and the taverns where chained bottles hang, towards the central darkness of the vaulted rooms where, among cells with signs, naked women wander obscurely. But the owner of the vaulted stone rooms recognized the saffron-colored dresses; and the straps of the beds remained without mattresses, since these men drunk on pink wine, squatting on the flagstones, rubbing the toes of their slippers with canes with silver heads, were enervés– spadones. Chapter 8. THE MILEANS. To Edmond de Goncourt. Suddenly, without anyone knowing the cause, the virgins of Miletus began to hang themselves. It was like a moral epidemic. Upon pushing open the doors of the gynaeceums, one struck the still quivering feet of a white body suspended from the beams. One was surprised by a hoarse sigh and by the clinking of rings, bracelets, and anklets rolling on the ground. The throats of the hanged women heaved like the fluttering wings of a bird being smothered. Their eyes seemed full of resignation, rather than horror. The young girls retired in the evening, silent, as is fitting, having remained seated in modest attire, without clasping their knees. In the middle of the night, moans resounded, and at first they were thought to be oppressed by heavy dreams, nocturnal birds of the brain. The parents got up and visited their rooms. They thought they would find them lying on their stomachs, their backs shaking with fear, or their arms crossed over their breasts, with their fingers pressed on the place where the heart beats. But the girls’ beds were empty. Then rocking was heard in the upper rooms. There, lit by the moon, their white tunics falling, their hands pressed one inside the other, up to the lowest joints of their fingers, they were hanging, and their swollen lips were turning blue. At dawn, the familiar sparrows flew over their shoulders, pecked at them, and finding their skin cold, flew away with little cries. Hardly had the first breath of morning made the sails stretched over the inner courtyards shiver, than it brought from the friendly houses the deep song of the mourners. And in the Market Square, among the buyers of the uncertain hours, before the light clouds turned pink, the list of the dead of the night was recited. Heralds ran here and there. Like the others, the daughters of magistrates and archons, barely nubile, on the eve of taking the yellow wedding veil, mysteriously hung themselves. The men who came to the assembly, all marked with the red cord that indicates latecomers, neglected the affairs of the people and wept into their hands. The trembling judges issued banishment orders and no longer dared to condemn to death. A large number of old women were driven from the dark alleys where the drug sellers lived, turning their heads away in the daylight . The painted women, whose gait was heavy and their eyes too dark, were expelled from the city. Those who taught unknown doctrines in the porticoes, the orators with the young men, the priests who carried images of goddesses on beasts of burden, the initiates of the mysteries and the lovers of Cybele were banished outside the walls. They went to people caves dug in the rock of the neighboring mountains in time immemorial. There they slept in stone chambers ; and some were used for people, others for philosophers; so that at dusk the young men of Miletus left the city to spend a night underground. Thus, on the slopes of the hills, through the openings cut in the mountain, lights were seen shining at the first hour of wakefulness; and everything in the city of Miletus that had been strange or impure continued its life inside the earth. Then the archons of the colony issued a decree by which it was ordered that the hanged maidens be buried in a new way. They were to be exposed to the populace, naked, with a cord around their necks, and thus carried to the tomb. And it was hoped that modesty would thereby overcome voluntary death, when the evening following the promulgation of this law the secret of the Milesians was discovered. Some priests who tended a sacred hearth in the temple of Athena rose a little before midnight to add reeds to the fire and pour oil into the lamps. And they saw advancing through the darkness of the central room a troop of virgins who seemed to have been warned by a dream. For they were heading in the shadows towards a certain slab, near the altar, which was lifted. A young boy, who usually carried the baskets of the goddess, veiled his head and entered beneath the temple with the virgins. The vault was high, barely lit by a faint point of light at the top. At bottom, the wall seemed dazzling, being made of a single metal mirror. At first this polished surface was nebulous, then fleeting images passed over it. It was of a glaucous color, like the eyes of the owls that are sacred to Pallas Athene. The first of the Milesians advanced towards the immense mirror, smiling, and undressed. The veil attached to the shoulder fell, then the fold of the breast, and the azure belt that held the throat: her body appeared in its splendor. And she untied the twist of her hair which spread over her shoulders to her heels. The other young girls, beside her, laughed at seeing her reflected. Yet no image appeared to those who were nearby, in the metal mirror. But the young girl, her eyes horribly dilated, wept a cry of a terrified beast. She fled, and the sound of her bare feet on the flagstones was heard . Then, amidst the terror of the silence, minutes having passed, the howl of the mourners resounded. And the second who reflected herself contemplated the polished surface and uttered the same moan over her nudity. And when she had gone back up the steps of the temple in her bewilderment, the distant moans made it known again that she had hanged herself under the cold light of the moon. The young boy placed himself exactly behind the third, and his gaze matched the gaze of the Milesian woman, and the cry of horror burst from her lips at the same time. For the image in the sinister mirror was distorted in the natural sense of things. Similar to herself in this mirror, the Milesian woman saw her forehead covered with folds, her eyelids cut, the skin of old age over the oozing eyes of the chassie, her soft ears, her cheeks in pouches, her nostrils reddened and hairy, her chin greasy and divided, her shoulders hollowed with holes, her breasts faded and their pimples gone, her belly slumped towards the earth, her thighs browned, her knees flattened, her legs marked with tendons, her feet swollen with knots. The image no longer had any hair, and under the skin of its head ran opaque blue veins . Its outstretched hands appeared horn-like and its nails the color of lead. Thus the mirror presented to the Milesian virgin the spectacle of what life had in store for her. And in the features of the image she found all the signs of resemblance, the movement of the forehead and the line of the nose and the arch of the mouth and the spacing of the breasts, and above all the color of the eyes, which gives the sense of deep thought. Terrified by her body, ashamed of the future, before knowing Aphrodite, she hung from the beams of the gynaeceum. Now the young boy pursued her, and drove the other virgins before him. But he arrived too late, and the body of the Milesian woman was already undulating with agony. He stretched her out on the ground, and, before the mourners arrived , gently caressed her limbs and kissed her eyes. Such was the young boy’s response to the mirror of future truth, to the mirror of Athena. Chapter 9. 52 AND 83 ORFILA. To George Courteline. Along a large road planted with uniform trees, with regularly trimmed foliage, like sugar loaves stuck on slender stems , one saw a uniform yellowish wall, with two similar pavilions at the ends. The paint on the entrance gate was dull; then an oblong, sandblasted courtyard separated parallel buildings with high glass doors; the two-story buildings had lowered roofs from which rose, at equal intervals, slate-covered pinnacles. At the corners of the courtyard yawned gray vaults, from which one could not see the exit; and small round, square, triangular, diamond-shaped gardens , where the earth was stony among the sparse marijuana, stained with the benches the sad expanse of the walled ground with a few traces of pale green. Among these geometric figures of vegetation, descending from the steps, under the glass of the doors, around a single rectangular body of water, very dusty, emerging from the dull mouths of old stones which stretched out at the four corners, bands of human beings, barely agitated, advanced staggering, heads shaking, knees trembling; old men and women, some appearing, with their continual nodding of their persons, to always say yes, yes, the others, by the oscillation from right to left, no, no; old affirmations and negations, walking and stubborn with a weak movement that did not vary. The men wore hats that had lost all search for form, their felt being battered or bulging. But several placed their caps ambitiously to the side. The women let their wrinkled white hair float under their dirty bonnets; but some had curled their wigs, of a singular black, dark above their parchment faces. Passing thus in the gardened courtyard, poorly maintained, some old beauties made gestures with their hands, some old women, coquettishly, simpered with their glasses. And they gathered in groups, around the benches, read little newspapers, offered each other prizes; while dazed boarders looked with worried expressions at the sly smiles they no longer understood. The hospital they lived in received them after sixty, for a thousand francs and a small allowance to add meat to their daily fare. Those who were rich owned their room, marked with a number, in a corridor. One was no longer the owner of a name. There was 63 Voltaire, 119 Arago; one deposited, upon entering, the signs of recognition that had served in society during the course of an ordinary life; this lively cemetery remained more anonymous than the cemetery of the dead. Now, this numbered society took its rules and its conventions; for the incumbents of the rooms in the corridors, having enough to lose in the gaming rooms, to offer pleasant people of another sex delicate canteen drinks, despised the miserable tenants of the common rooms, where one could not, under the greedy eyes, dress up, nor hide one’s baldness. Having the right to bi-weekly distributions of medicines, they besieged the interns before their time, spied on the notebook, came as if to the grocery store, with old scraps of paper on which they had noted their orders, delighted in imitating coughs with their rattling chests, in exaggerating the pain in their twisted limbs, in imitating insomnia, in crying over imaginary ailments; they envied their illnesses at the consultation, so that they could triumphantly carry off bath vouchers, vials of camphorated alcohol, bottles of sugar syrup.
They placed them on their night tables, looking at them alternately as beneficial works of art, or as provisions they had bought cheaply; but above all they experienced the joy of possessing more than the others—since for them it was the last form of property. The Orfila room was inhabited by old women too poor to pay the rent for a room. Two rows of beds, of dubious whiteness , faced each other, and on the folded sheets, there was a double row of busts covered in camisoles. No. 53 got up, was still quite agile, despite a rheumatic fever that stiffened her left knee, and a partial paralysis of the right arm, folded across the belt. She was respected; for it was said that she received a little money from distant relatives; but she preferred to keep it, to use as she saw fit, instead of paying it to the administration in exchange for accommodation. Opposite her, No. 52 annoyed her with his superior agility; she had the use of both arms, suffered only from gout in one toe, but her lower right eyelid, drooping as a result of the increasing weakness of a muscle, exposed the bloody underside of the eye. These two women, physical rivals, were also rivals of the heart. Nothing of human passion had disappeared among these old men and women.
For in the rooms there were false households for two and at three; violent scenes of jealousy were heard; snuffboxes and crutches were thrown at each other’s heads through the corridors; at night shriveled shadows watched at the doors, armed with a threatening bolster, their cotton caps pulled up to their chins; and there were chases of wobbly people, flights of coxalgic women, proud gossip among the old women who chatted while washing their linen: one emphatically exalted her man who was decorated, and well-groomed; another boasted of hers, who still had all his limbs. So that old bony fists still fell on prominent cheekbones; the turns of hair flew away, leaving bare pointed or humped skulls; the glasses were broken on the noses black with tobacco; old sharp elbows appeared symmetrical, the hands placed on the hips; and terrible, quavering insults resounded all day long. The battle raged between the 52 and the 53 over a red sugar pipe . There was an old man with a military face, probably a caretaker when he was a man, who regularly visited the 53 Orfila like his cousin. The words my cousin, my cousin, repeated like an echo to the nurses’ ears by those toothless mouths, lulled their surveillance. But the 52 had acquired a taste for the man opposite her. She pursed her mouth, rolled her eyes, brushed against him with her camisole, as she passed, with a little stutter. The others hated her with envy, for the freedom of her movements. We heard fat laughter from catarrh that provoked nervous coughs of exhaustion. The old man, flattered, abandoned the game of swells and the manila to come flirt in the afternoon. 53 tied his tie, poured eye drops into his eyes, and offered him precious electric pills, which she kept in a small box hidden under her pillow. But she couldn’t help but look jealously at the night table of 52, who regularly went to the consultation, from where she constantly brought back bottles that she displayed with complacency. The day the old man graciously took a red pipe from his checked handkerchief , 53 stirred joyfully, folded back her pillow, leaned against it, and with the pipe, her teeth trembling, she mocked her opposite number with her eyes. She showed the pipe like a child, twirled it in the air, sucked on it, looked at the end she had sucked; she had words of double meaning, which were not noted, but which were not lost. Indeed, from that moment on, 52 disappeared every morning at the same time. No one knew where she was going. For several days, she seemed to have a broken heart. Little by little, she seemed more cheerful. Finally, one morning, returning from her mysterious walk, she gave 53’s red pipe a magnificent thumbing of the nose, then, spreading two fingers, showed horns above her forehead, and touched her right arm with a gesture of mocking desolation, as if to pity 53 for not being able to do the same. This marked the end. A plot was hatched in the Orfila room against the impudent and troublesome woman. People pretended to spit when she passed; the old women touched their eyes, with disgusted nausea, whispered among themselves, and kept 52 at a distance. In the evening, the rustling of paper and the squeaking of pencils were heard. However, the old man, with an innocent air, always came to see his cousin. Number 53 did not seem at all irritated. Less eager, however, she affectedly asked her cousin what he was doing all morning; and the old man, rubbing his dry hands, lied to his heart’s content. On the day of the head doctor’s visit, there was a general movement of curiosity. The doctor stopped in front of number 52 and said aloud to the nurses: You will change this room. Number 52, astonished, murmured: But why, doctor? The doctor replied, resuming his rounds: Your companions will take it upon themselves to tell you. No sooner had he left than the concert began. Painful whistles rang out from both ends of the room, with fits of joy. Some old women were drooling with pleasure. Others were beating their sheets in a paroxysm of laughter. And the 53rd, completely on her feet , shouted, brandishing her pipe: Why, my child? Because we petitioned against you. The whole room. Your red eye disgusts us. We can no longer eat. Like a raucous chorus, all the sick people cried out, with a chest rattle: Yes, your eye disgusts us! The 52nd, stupefied, remained leaning against her pillow. To her left, a woman whose eye muscles were paralyzed, moved her head from side to side, up and down, like a parrot, her pupils fixed, to feed on her vexation. On his right, an old woman, suffering from agitated paralysis, was frantically snapping her jaws, and, in an uninterrupted movement, her mask without wrinkles, was continually rolling imaginary cigarettes, flush with the blanket. Chapter 10. THE MOFFLAINES SABBAT. To Jean Lorrain. Colart, Lord of Beaufort and knight, returning through the town of Arras one evening after he had been drinking honeyed hippocras late at the Hôtel du Cygne, passed along the cemetery. There, under the light of the moon, which appeared red because it was crowned with fog, he saw three girls of joy holding hands. They were muttering subtly and smiling with the corners of their lips. They took him very gently under the arms, and two told him that their names were Blancminette and Belotte, and the third, who was Flemish, shook her blond hair and spoke to him in her jargon. The others called her Vergensen. The Chevalier de Beaufort, approaching, saw that they were turning around a white slab. And the three girls laughed at him with joy when he drew back; for they were pouring royal water from a green flask onto the stone—and the stone began to rustle like quicklime. And they threw into it disemboweled lizards, frogs’ legs, hairy rat snouts, feet of night birds, rock arsenic, black blood from a copper basin, strips of soiled linen, mandrake roots, and the long foxglove flowers called fingers of death. And yet they kept saying: Riders of escovettes, riders of escovettes, riders of escovettes. Immediately Colart no longer knew where in the world he was. But Belotte, Blancminette, and Vergensen led him to an old lime kiln that was yawning near the cemetery. He stood in the shadow of the white door, and a woman came out, without a coat, shoes, or finery; she seemed to be dressed only in a long shirt marked with lunar rings, and her face was half-covered by a black hood. The three girls of joy clapped their hands, crying: Demiselle, Demiselle, Demiselle. Now this Demiselle had in her hands a small earthenware pot and some wooden rods. She anointed five rods with a black ointment that was in the pot, and the three girls of joy placed them between their legs, riding them like a horse. And Demiselle made the Chevalier de Beaufort do the same. And she anointed the palms of their hands with her finger; from which suddenly Colart found himself flying through the night air with the four women. For from the anointed rod that was between his legs, it seemed to him that it was a vagabond horse with silent flight, and from his hands stained with ointment clawed membranes like wings. As they flew beyond the city of Arras, the knight Colart questioned the three girls. And they told him that they were going to their Master in the wood of Mofflaines, which is a league away in the countryside. And Vergensen, shaking his head, laughed again in the air. They fell into a faintly luminous clearing. The masses of leaves trembled. There was a prodigiously long table, the end of which was lost in the forest, near the high fountains. It was laden with red, brown, and white meats, quarters of mutton, briskets of beef, legs of venison, and wild boar’s heads . The poultry was piled high, with fat under their thin skins, and large geese on spits were stuck at the top end. The sauceboats were filled to the brim with verjuice and broth with soft sugar. The dishes glittered like silver and gold under the flans, darioles, and crowns of fried dough. The tankards were steaming; for they were red with warm wine, and there were jugs of frothing, blond mead. And all over the table, as far as one could see, naked women were lying, dipping their heels into oval bowls, among the glassware and the pots of stoneware and enamel. But in the middle, sitting half on the women and half on the meat, stood a large black dog, its paws apart, its mouth bloody, barking at the moon. Now the dog barked at Demiselle, and Colart remained shivering between Belotte and Blancminette, for Vergensen, stripping naked, had rushed towards the table, and kissed the dark muzzle of the large dog. And it seemed to the knight that the dog, in return, bit the Flemish woman on the throat, from which she kept a red triangle as if she had been branded with an iron. Meanwhile, Colart took a seat between Belotte and Blancminette, and they made him drink, from a vase of singular shape, a hot liquor that tasted of ink. And immediately afterward, he saw that what had seemed to him a black dog was a crouching green monkey, with a lashing tail, a snapping jaw, and fiery eyes. Several of the guests came to kiss his paw, and he dug his claw around their mouths. There Colart de Beaufort recognized a very tall lady from Arras, Jehanne d’Auvergne, and Huguet Camery, barber, who was called Patenôtre, and Jehan Le Fèvre, sergeant of aldermen, with several other aldermen, lords, clerks, and notables of the city, even an old painter who might have been seventy years old, whose beard was white, Jehan Lavite, whom he knew well. This old painter appeared there in great honor, and the others called him Abbot of Peu-de-Sens, and he pulled his cape to the right and left in reverence. Being a rhetorician, he recited several dictums and beautiful ballads of joyful life, and one in praise of the Virgin Mary, at the end of which he uncovered his head and said: Do not displease my Master! Which made Vergensen laugh, and the green monkey pulled his hair under his hood. The Abbot of Peu-de-Sens came to the knight, and greeted him very devoutly with the name of handsome lord, and told him that he wanted to bring him to his master to pay him homage, however ordered him to spit on the way. And Colart, following him, was astonished with fear; for there was on the ground a long crucifix where the guests put their feet and which he was ordered to defile. Then he came before the green monkey, and there knew that he had been mistaken, seeing that the green monkey was properly a goat with cloven feet, having in truth a long tail in the resemblance of a monkey. The Abbot of Peu-de-Sens put two burning candles in his hand, and told him that he should go on his knees and kiss the goat’s backside, which is the way to pay homage to him. And Colart carrying the two lighted candles, all the riders on the left shouted: Homage, homage! and the riders on the right: Our Master, our Master! The goat turned and Colart obeyed, thinking that his mouth had become burning and was emitting smoke. And this done, the goat called the riders on the left and the riders on the right, and praised Colart for his faith; and the Abbot brought other new ones with two candles in their hands, and they kissed the goat in the manner that the knight had done. Then, among the women naked and the Abbot who was reciting lays, all began to eat and drink. And suddenly there was a breath of cold wind and the sky turned gray among the leaves. The riders put their escovettes between their legs, and Colart found himself flying again through the morning air. And Demiselle disappeared first, then Belotte and Blancminette; but Vergensen had remained with the goat in the wood of Mofflaines. All things which were confessed by Colart, knight, lord of Beaufort, after the bishop of Arras had put him in hell in his prisons. For before him, Demiselle, Belotte and Blancminette, girls of joy, had been delivered to secular justice with the Abbot of Peu-de-Sens. They were mitered with a miter on which was painted the figure of the devil in the flames, and burned on scaffolds, although the Abbot had cut his tongue with a small knife so as not to respond with his mouth to the torture. As for the blond-haired Flemish woman, who laughed while riding at the Sabbath, she could not be found, and Colart was never seen again. For the knight was not burned. The Duke of Burgundy sent his favorite herald, Golden Fleece, from Brussels to hear his confession. Golden Fleece implored the mercy of ecclesiastical justice. Colart de Beaufort was mitered with the miter on which was painted the figure of the devil, and imprisoned for seven years, on bread and water, in one of the Chartres of the Bishop of Arras, which was called the Bonnel. Chapter 11. THE SPEAKING MACHINE. To Jules Renard. The man who entered, holding a newspaper in his hand, had mobile features and a fixed gaze; I remember that he was pale and wrinkled, that I never once saw him smile, and that his way of placing a finger on his mouth was full of mystery. But what first arrested one’s attention was the muffled and hurried sound of his voice. When his speech was slow and low, one heard the deep tones of this voice, with sudden silences of vibrations, as if there were distant harmonics quivering in unison; but almost always the words pressed on his lips, and burst forth dull, broken, discordant, like the sounds of cracking. There seemed to be strings in him constantly breaking. And from this voice all the intonations had disappeared; one felt no nuances in it as if it had been prodigiously old and worn. However, the visitor, whom I had never seen, came forward and said: You wrote these lines, didn’t you? And he read: The voice which is the aerial sign of thought, and thus of the soul, which instructs, preaches, exhorts, prays, praises, loves, by which being is manifested in life, almost palpable for the blind, impossible to describe because it is too undulating, and diverse, too alive precisely and embodied in too many sonorous forms, the voice that Théophile Gautier refused to express in words because it is neither soft, nor dry, nor warm, nor cold, nor colorless, nor colored, but something of all that in another domain, this voice which cannot be touched, which cannot be seen, the most immaterial of earthly things, the one which most resembles a spirit, science pricks it as it passes with a stylus and buries it in small holes on a rotating cylinder. When he had finished, his tumultuous speech bringing to my ears only a muffled sound, this man danced on one leg, then on the other, and without opening his lips gave a dry sneer that cracked. –Science–he said–the voice…. Further still you wrote: A great poet taught that speech could not be lost, being movement, that it was powerful and creative, and that perhaps, at the limits of the world, its vibrations gave birth to other universes, aqueous or volcanic stars, new burning suns. And we both know, don’t we, that Plato had predicted, long before Poë, the power of speech: Οὐχ ἁπλῶς ὴ ἀέρος ἔστιν ἡ φωνὴ. The voice is not just a tapping on the air: for the finger, in moving itself, can strike the air and will never be able to make a voice. And we also know that one day in December 1890, the anniversary of Robert Browning’s death, the living voice of the poet was heard emerging from the coffin of a phonograph at Edison-House, and that the sound waves of the air can be resurrected forever. You are scholars and poets; you know how to imagine, preserve, even resurrect: creation is unknown to you. I looked at the man with pity. A deep wrinkle crossed his forehead from the tips of his hair to the root of his nose. Madness seemed to bristle his hairs and illuminate the globes of his eyes. The aspect of his face was triumphant, as in those who believe themselves emperor, pope, or God, and despise those ignorant of their greatness. “Yes,” continued this man—his voice grew stifled as it tried to become louder—”you have written all that others know and most of the things they can dream; but I am greater. I can, if Poe wills, create rotating worlds and flaming and howling spheres, with the sound of matter that has no soul; and I have surpassed Lucifer in this, that I can force unorganized things to blasphemies. Day and night, at my will, skins that were once living and metals that perhaps are not yet, utter inanimate words; and if it is true that the voice creates universes in space, those I make it create are worlds that die before they have lived. In my house lies a Behemoth that bellows at the indication of my hand; I invented a speaking machine. I followed the man who was heading towards the door. We passed through busy roads, turbulent streets; then we reached the outskirts of the city, while the gas lamps lit up one by one behind us. Before the low postern of a blackened wall, the man stopped and pulled a bolt. We entered a dark and silent courtyard. And there my heart was filled with anguish: for I heard groans, grating cries and syllabified words, which seemed to be bellowed from a gaping throat. And these words had no nuance, as did the voice of my guide, so that, in this disproportionate enlargement of vocal sonorities, I recognized nothing human. The man made me enter a room that I could not look at, so terrible did it seem to me because of the monster that stood there. For there was in its center, raised to the ceiling, a giant throat, distended and pockmarked, with folds of black skin that hung and swelled, a breath of subterranean storm, and two enormous lips that trembled above. And among the creaking of wheels, and the cries of metal wire, one could see these mounds of leather quivering, and the gigantic lips yawned hesitantly; then, at the red bottom of the chasm that opened, an immense fleshy lobe stirred, rose, waddled , stretched upwards, downwards, to the right, to the left; A gust of puffing wind burst into the machine, and articulated words gushed forth, pushed by an extra-human voice. The explosions of the consonants were terrifying; for the P and the B, similar to the V, escaped directly from the swollen and black labial edges: they seemed to be born before our eyes; the D and the T rushed forth under the snarling upper mass of the leather which was turning back; and the R, long prepared, had a sinister roll. The vowels, abruptly modified, spurted from the gaping mouth like jets of a trumpet. The stammering of the S and the CH surpassed in horror the prodigious mutilations. “Here,” said the man, placing his hand on the shoulder of a small woman , deformed and nervous, “is the soul that moves the keyboard of my machine. It performs on my piano pieces of human speech. I have trained it to the admiration of my will: its notes are stutters, its scales and exercises, the BA BE BI BO BU of the school, its studies, the fables of my composition, its fugues, my lyrical pieces and my poems, its symphonies, my blasphemous philosophy. You see the keys which bear in their syllabic alphabet, on their triple row, all the miserable signs of human thought. I produce concurrently, and without damnation intervening, the thesis and the antithesis of the truths of man and his God. He placed the little woman at the keyboard, behind the machine. Listen, he said in his stifled voice. And the bellows began to move under the pedals; the folds hanging from the throat swelled; the monstrous lips quivered and yawned; the tongue worked, and the roar of articulated speech exploded: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, the machine howled. –This is a lie, said the man. It is the lie of the books that are said to be sacred. I have studied for years and years; I have opened throats in dissecting rooms; I have heard the voices, the cries, the tears, the sobs and the sermons; I have measured them mathematically; I have removed them from myself and from others; I have broken my own voice in my efforts; and, so much have I lived with my machine, I speak without nuance like it; for nuance belongs to the soul, and I have suppressed it. Here is the truth and the new word. And he cried, at the top of his voice–but the sentence resounded like a hoarse murmur: The Machine will say: I CREATED THE WORD And the bellows began to move under the pedals; the folds hanging from the throat swelled; the monstrous lips quivered and yawned; the tongue worked, and the word exploded in a monstrous stammer: VER-BE VER-BE VER-BE There was an extraordinary tearing in the wires, a creaking of cogs, a sinking of the throat, a universal withering of the leathers, a rocket of air which carried away the syllabic keys in debris; and I could not know if the machine had refused the blasphemy, or if the performer of words had introduced into the mechanism a principle of destruction: for the little deformed woman had disappeared, and the man, whose wrinkles furrowed his completely tense face, waved his fingers furrowed in front of his mute mouth, having definitively lost his voice. Chapter 12. BLOODY WHITE. To Paul Margueritte. After William of Flavy felt tired of battles and politics, he wanted to increase his inheritance and take a wife. He was a tall, strong man, broad-shouldered, mamma-like, and hairy-chested; placing his two hands on two armed knights, he made them bend to the ground. He put on his hoofs and himself passed through the soil, through the hoe, striking with his thick hand the backs of the muddy men who bent among the furrows. His square face was red with the blood that always beat at his temples, and the bones of the meat crunched between his jaws. Near Reims, he saw one day, riding at the edge of his meadows, the fields of Robert d’Ovrebreuc. He dismounted and entered the great hall of the house. The hutches, arranged along the walls, vast, suitable for hiding people, had a shabby air; The household table was rickety, the hearth iron rusted, the spindle coated with half an inch of grime. Here and there one saw a shoemaker’s apron, awls, flat hammers; and in a corner a man, legs crossed, was drawing the needle on a coarse linen shirt. But crouching on the hearthstones, her astonished, clear gaze, golden hair scattered around her pale face, a little girl turned her head towards Guillaume de Flavy. She could have been ten years old; her chest was flat, her limbs slender, her hands small; and her mouth was that of a woman, cut into the pale face like a bleeding struggle for mental health. It was Blanche d’Ovrebreuc; her father had become, a few days before, by succession, Viscount of Acy. With a rounded back, a long beard, and hands made suitable only for tools, he had, when considering his fiefs, the surprised and worried aspect of a man handling a dangerous object. The English squire Jacques de Béthune, who served under Luxembourg, had already come to ask for the girl, and her father, uncertain, did not know whether to wait for better. The estates were encumbered with three hundred thousand crowns; the former Viscount of Acy owed, in his own person, a good ten thousand; perhaps the English or the Luxembourgers would arrange that. But it was Guillaume de Flavy who carried off little Blanche. He paid the debts to keep the lands. Having married her in due matrimony, he promised not to marry her for real for three years. Thus, a man of great appearance, he got his hands on the fiefs of Acy and on a slender, wild, childlike being. Three months later, little Blanche, with furrowed brows and pale eyes, wandered through the castle like a sick cat, having experienced the cruel betrothal of Guillaume de Flavy. She did not understand, and could not understand. She was very different in age and shape. The man was hard on her, as he was on his barber: when he had wiped his mouth at the table with the back of his hand, he threw the meat he no longer wanted in the face of this obsequious barber. He shouted and swore continually, having kept control of his wine and the food. He brought the dishes before him, leaving Blanche’s father and mother at either end of the table , a mother whose head was already wobbly and whose bones were forming corners in her body: she lived for some time, almost without eating, almost without speaking, ancient, unintelligible, became pale and died. The father, having wasted away as if he had taken poison, signed deeds for Flavy, after drinking; he had abandoned the lands, loaded with debts, and was rubbing his hands, humming, for his good life annuity. But, no longer eating, he wanted to have the money, cried weakly, a poor terrified creature, composed in his trembling handwriting a roll of complaints for the king. William seized the papers as they passed; the old man groaned; the servants put him in the dungeon and, opening it to the sun a month later, they found a dry corpse, his teeth fixed in a shoe whose toe had been gnawed by rats. Little Blanche became extraordinarily greedy. She ate sweets to death, and her bloody mouth was gorged with round pastries and creams. Bent over the table, her eyes close to the meat, she devoured quickly, with a gaze always limpid; then she drank great draughts of wine, Pineau or Morillon, her head thrown back; one could see a wave of pleasure pass over her face; she tipped a goblet of wine into her mouth, which was wide open, kept it without swallowing, her cheeks puffed out, and made it spurt out of her into the faces of the guests, like a living fountain. Staggering after the meal, she would get up; and, overcome with wine, she would stand against the wall, like a man. Her manner pleased the insult of Aurbandac, dark and malicious, whose eyebrows joined in a line above his nose. He often came to Flavy, whose relation he was, and whose estates he impatiently awaited. Being supple, sinewy, with steely shanks and strong wrists, he looked mockingly at William’s heavy body. But little Blanche was not affected. He then spoke to her delicately about her dresses; he was surprised to see her still in her wedding dress (for he found her grown up since then); he mentioned little bourgeois women who had dresses of scarlet, Malines or fine vair, lined with good gray, with long sleeves, with a hood from whose long jug hung a red or green silk fabric, which trailed to the ground. She listened as if someone were talking to her about a doll’s costume. Then the insult of Aurbandac got the better of her, glass in hand, and made her drink and laugh, and gave her sweets, mocking her husband, so that she splashed the wine like a bird bathing , beating its wings, in a full rut. The barber, whose long face bore marks of leg of lamb bones, leaned between them; and he put his head with that of the insult. They plotted to take the castle; that it would be the insult who would have it, the woman being at the mercy of each by her innocence, provided that she had the key to the cellar and the pantry. One evening, Guillaume de Flavy, stumbling on the threshold, struck his face: he made a wound that opened his cheek and nose. He shouted for the barber, who almost immediately brought anointed cloths, with a singular odor. As the night passed, Guillaume’s face swelled; the skin was white and taut, with brown faces; the prominent eyes wept incessantly, and the wound had the hideous appearance of mortified flesh. All morning he remained in an armchair, screaming in pain; little Blanche seemed so terrified that she forgot to drink; and she looked at Guillaume from the other end of the room with her transparent eyes, while her mouth, very red, moved weakly. Hardly had Guillaume gone upstairs to sleep, watched over by the squire Bastoigne, than the castle resounded with a thousand faint noises. Blanche listened, her ear to the door, a finger on her lips. Muffled clashes of mail coats, dull clashes of weapons, the creaking of the gate of the great postern gate, an unusual crackling in the courtyard could be heard; a few uncertain gleams of lanterns passed and repassed. Meanwhile, the resin torches, in the great hall where the pieces of meat were still displayed, burned with a straight flame and a long smoky thread through the calm air. Blanche went up softly with her childlike gait to her husband’s room : he was sleeping on his back, his swollen face, surrounded by bandages, turned towards the upper beams. Bastoigne came out because Blanche was going to bed. She slipped in and seized the hideous head under her arm, caressing it. Guillaume was breathing with difficulty, in uneven gasps. Then little Blanche threw herself across, took the pillow, held it firmly over the swaddled face, and slid a peephole, usually sealed, over the bed. The insult’s black head passed through it: he was crawling cautiously. With a leap, he was on his knees on Guillaume’s chest and struck him two or three blows on the head with a split stick he was dragging. The man emerged from the sheets and a horrible cry burst from his swollen mouth. But the barber, coming out from under the straps, seized Bastoigne by the body as he opened the door; and the insult cut Guillaume’s throat with a ox tongue he had at his belt. The body straightened up and rolled to the ground, dragging little Blanche with it; she remained on the ground, lying under the warm corpse, receiving the warm blood which flowed down her neck, because her dress was caught under her dying husband, and she was not strong enough to free herself. The thoughtful barber helped little Blanche to get up, while the insult rushed to the window; and as Blanche d’Ovrebreuc, Viscountess of Acy, was religious, she wiped her mouth and her husband’s face with her Picardy hood, put it on his swollen face and said in her childish voice three Our Fathers and an Ave amidst the shouts of the men of the insult d’Aurbandac, who were looking for the chests of oats. Chapter 13. LA GRANDE-BRIÈRE. To Paul Hervieu. After the sunken roads, furrowed with muddy ruts where the The carriage jolted, the horse raised its rear roughly, the coachman smoking his short pipe swore and tapped his large hat flapping in the wind, barren lands stretched out before us, strewn with gray stones. Gorse grew there in clumps, with rare broom. Further on the ground sloped down steadily and became muddy; large pools opened on the sides of the road and hideous frogs plunged headlong into them. The farm, covered with moldy thatch, lay between two low hovels on a carpet of chopped straw , soaked with liquid manure. A woman appeared at the door, her apron pulled up; she looked at us suspiciously, and when we entered, she muttered malicious words. The floor was of beaten earth; the black beams running along the ceiling bore round golden loaves. The sausages hung in rows and quarters of salted meat were piled up on a bay. In the window, two workers were throwing the shuttle under a loom, where the threads crossed and uncrossed with each beat of the mechanism. One of them had a deep crease in her forehead, dark eyes sunk under hard eyebrows; her breasts appeared small, but firm, in the laced bodice; the whole body was gracefully thin. With a surly expression, the peasant woman gave butter, pushed the hat off the table placed on a chest, cut liches of bread, broke her eggs into a yellow earthenware dish. When we asked to go to the marsh, she looked at us furiously and called her man. He was behind the door, in the ox-shed; His frayed trousers hung around his iron-rimmed clogs, and two wide suspenders held the belt halfway across his chest. His face was thin and anxious; his eyes wandered perpetually towards every object; he stroked his white whiskers fearfully. “Into the marsh, where do you want to go?” he asked. “What’s the use? The water’s low; it’s a real struggle to turn around in there. Unless there are two boat-hooks; I can’t do it alone, of course. ” “Take Marianne and you,” said the woman. “She’s strong now .” One of the seamstresses, who had a crease in her forehead, raised her nose. “You’re still not after the duck,” the man continued. ” Pardon, excuse me, sometimes.” Because there aren’t any yet—a few gangs in the rouche, maybe.—And you, he said to the seamstress, haven’t you seen the tide-hunters last night? Do you want to come to the young ladies of Pornichet? Marianne frowned and adjusted her dress. The peasant turned to us and continued: It’s a misfortune. There’s a girl who’s come, and who’s supposedly dizzy. She works in a house, over there, with some girls from Paris. It comes on her at midnight; it’s a weight that goes on her chest. She tosses and turns—it does n’t matter. She kisses her little girl on her bed, she smothers her, she rolls her in her spit, she makes friends with her like a person; She’ll fetch him some chicks in the guernier, to sweeten his beak–and then the bigot again, she says words to him, how pitiful. She doesn’t hear a thing and her eyes are closed, how much worse….–Afterwards, until the bride, there she is, gone to sleep. Her fiancé, who went last year, doesn’t want to suffer him anymore. She cries sometimes; she says she would like to marry him, but that it’s not possible anymore. It’s turning our blood. She seemed not to hear him, and was waiting for us, on the threshold, with the boat’s equipment. It was a flat-bottomed boat, freshly tarred. The man pushed us towards the narrow, winding channel, which led out to the open sea of the marsh. The water was black, because of the soil—a brown bog dug with twisted furrows. As we glided along the water lilies, the plain stretched out to the right and to the left, covered in the distance with yellowish gorse and green reed; the tall, flexible stems bent in masses in the wind. Like a wild, half-flooded meadow, the Grande-Brière stretched to the horizon with its tall, quivering marijuanas. From time to time the boat scraped the peat and came up against a hairy embankment, from which the reeds sprang; it was turned over, and it slid again among the red stems of water lilies and the red freshwater marijuanas. A pale, ashen sky cast a subdued light over the Brière; flocks of birds took off above the reeds, with hoarse cries. In places, the vaporous rays of the sun made vague, white mirrors among the grass; the water trembled between the stems; The reeds crossed over the mounds of peat, and the white roots that surfaced looked like bundles of pale eels, dead of boredom. “We won’t see any young ladies,” said the peasant. His daughter turned around at once and pointed to a flock of animals on the right. Our guns were ready: the salvo brought only one bird, which slowly descended, describing a spiral in the air. When it touched the cold water, it began to hop, beating the surface of its wing, crying out towards the light. With bare legs, the man went to fish it out; he held it by the red leg. The young lady of Pornichet had a soft gray body, a black head, a long pink beak, with pointed nostrils. At her cries, her flock of sisters came hovering above the boat—a cloud of sisters that squawked, whirling and lowering, suddenly rising to flee with their wings until they were black dots in the reddish ash of the sky, then gradually growing larger until they were running towards us, wings outstretched, beaks open, threatening and bewildered. Soon the damselfly was swinging from the end of a boat hook, stuck in the peat; tied by one leg, she was spinning miserably and waving her wing stump, uttering desperate cries through her gaping beak. The whole troop, attracted, responded with moans; a point would break off from above and the outermost bird would try to free it. We pulled, however, and the damselflies would fall in great circles, plunging into the water with their black heads and red beaks that rattled in agony. The winged chain of the others, winding over our heads, was still weeping. “You help each other, young ladies,” said the man. “It’s easier to kill.” As he spoke, at the bottom of the opposite channel, a green boat appeared, like an animal born in the rouche and which lived in Brière. A man could be seen standing in the bow, and behind it, a small black and red spot must have been a woman’s hat. “Here’s your mistress,” the peasant continued; “she’s coming to Brière before leaving for Paris to get married. It wouldn’t be a bad example for you to take a man. ” The savage cry that burst from Marianne’s lips stopped his words. She was leaning on her boat hook; her black eyes darted flames—the wrinkle on her forehead was deeply furrowed. “Ah! Aile is going!” she cried. “Ah! Aile is taking her lover to Brière!” And me, where am I going? It’s not something to do. I had a promise—I don’t have any more—I’m nobody of any body type at this hour, and bony—I’m losing my mind —it’s her who’s the cause. There’s no tide-hunter—it’s the Parisian woman; there’s no balls—it’s the Parisian woman. She cast a spell on me; I couldn’t last without a wing, and I can’t yet. But she won’t leave, no, not at all. I’ll make her stay, me! Slumped on the bench, she wept in great fits, her face hidden in her skirt; and the peasant’s expression had become more worried, and we looked at each other in silence, not knowing what to think. The man was pushing the boat with the boathook—and suddenly a flock of ducks took off heavily from the rook. The time to take the duck boat, we could only see five points in the background of the sky. Attracted by the departure, young ladies from Pornichet were sped in pairs ahead and behind. The green boat was now approaching; it was straight ahead of us. The young girl, sitting behind, wore a light gray dress with a wide-brimmed red collar, and a black musketeer hat; she had blond hair that fell in curls. Marianne gradually stopped sobbing; she bit her lip for a few moments and suddenly said: “I’m going to try to kill some, too, young lady from Pornichet!” She stretched out her arm, seized the duck boat, shouldered it, and fired. The act was sudden and cruel. The young girl in the boat gave a shrill cry, followed by quavering moans; she fell, her head bent, like a slaughtered bird—and her red neck was lifted by the rattle. We had seized—too late—the arm of Marianne, whose face was peaceful and cynical, her forehead pure and unwrinkled. The sun, setting on the horizon, bloodied the ash of the sky and cut the green ruffle with pink reflections. The dome of clouds gilded at its summit; a circle of mist encircled the round meadow; the last reflections of the day danced on the Grande-Brière. The desolate immensity of the undulating grasslands on the flooded peat bog fled as far as the eye could see. The young ladies of Pornichet circled, weeping, screaming, around the dead girl , and tugged at her dress with their red beaks. Then Marianne began to laugh and said: Young ladies help each other. It’s easier to kill. Come on, shoot! THE FAKE SALT MEN To Charles Maurras. Chapter 14. I cannot say how I came to row on the king’s galleys, for there is too much shame. But let one choose from the five kinds of people who write on the water with fifteen-foot quills, Turks, Protestants, salt swindlers, deserters, and thieves: and let each take the worst; I may have been that. I know the galleys of Marseille; the Sun King holds twenty-four of them, and the convicts are happy there. At sea there is great heat, and sweat, and vermin, and the chains are heavy to drag, and the smell of the bilge gives the plague; but in port, for two liards to the algousin and the Turk, five liards to the halberdier who leads them, they can go to town, see their wives, and open a shop on the harbor. In the Ocean, there are six galleys, and I had the misfortune to pass among them. There we suffered the fog, and the rain, and the big groundswells that made us jump the oar, the five of us, hands, and the sea swells that soaked our biscuit; and the cold made us hungry; we had only our ten o’clock soup, the jafle, hot water with a little oil and beans, and the pint of wine that was poured for us by the galley master did not warm us. The deck of the galley is flat; along its entire length runs a large bench, where the three committees ride, who beat us with the rod; each time it falls, it hits three men. Below deck, we count six rooms for ammunition and the mouth, which we call Gavon, Scandelat, Campagne, Paillot, Taverne and Chambre d’Avant. Then there is another narrow and dark room, pierced only by a hatch two feet square; at the two ends, two platforms, the tollards; three feet high between the tollards and the deck; a bailey in the middle. This is the galley’s hospital. The sick lie down on the tollards, with their chains; and, when they have a fever, they beat the deck with their heads and four limbs; you have to crawl among the dying and keep your face away from the bailey. Our comrades on the Green Ocean were salt smugglers; because salt is expensive on the Breton coasts, a pint there being worth nearly two crowns; while in Burgundy it is bought more cheaply. Those who bring their provisions to Brittany from another province are traitors for the salt tax. The king had them caught, marked, and sent with us. There were no deserters: they are easy to recognize, by their faces where the large wounds never dry in the sun; they cut off their noses to escape service, and vermin gnaws between their eyes. But we had some cheerful companions of the matte, who never despair; they wear the tape, which is a pretty fleur-de-lis, on their forehead or on their shoulder, and sometimes the red collar of the gallows rope. The salt smugglers endured better than we did, being accustomed to the gray sky, the yellow and green sea; but they never laughed, because they were always in revolt. Also those who had been with us in Marseille did not go to town with the piercers to the white houses of the port where there are wives for galley slaves: for it was said that they remained faithful during their time of punishment to fierce girls who had lived with them among the salt mills. On the night of Shrove Tuesday 1704 our galley La Superbe was abeam of the coast of the Gallo country. The captain, M. d’Antigny, with the officers, had invited our three committees and we were freely lying on the deck, happy to be able to scratch ourselves under our red jackets and our coarse linen shirts, to be able to take off our caps and rub our shaved heads on the rails. Usually, at night, we had to bear the itching without moving; the rattling of the chain woke the officers, and the rod fell on our poor comrades. Four salt scythes were lying in the tollard room, cruelly bound, their bodies bleeding; They had received the knotted rope during the day, lying naked on our bronze cannon, the Coursier; and we heard them moaning below deck. I was about to doze off when the Vogue-avant, to which I was chained, touched me on the shoulder. Each of us is attached to a Turk; and we call them Vogue-avant because they hold the end of the oar, being more expert than we, as master oarsmen that the king buys for the galleys. Look, the Vogue-avant said to me; there are fire ships at sea. The mist was light: but we could not see the coasts. Nothing but a long line of luminous foam, and, in places, like white lights that seemed to sparkle, turn yellow and green. In the Mediterranean, the battle had accustomed me to fire ships. The brigantines of the Duke of Savoy, which were cruising against us, leaving Villa Franca, Saint-Hospitio and Oneglia, launched them at night, adrift, and we sank them with the Coursier which fires thirty-six-pound cannonballs. But here, on the Ocean, I knew nothing more. The fireships I knew were red and moving: while the lights we saw were fixed, of white light, with abrupt yellow figures. The sea had large calm undulations; the pilot was watching near the lantern, at the bow, and, from the middle of the tent which covered the deck between the two masts, a single oil lamp hung swinging. All was so calm that they could not be flames of distress. I rolled near the Vogue-avant, and we raised our chain, each with one hand. Listening intently, it seemed to us that the boats were tossing against the keel. We crept forward to the starboard side, which was facing the land, and with our heads above the rail, we saw the caïque, the long boat, slowly detaching itself from the galley, full of crouching men, dressed in white shirts with red masks. One of them was slowly pushing the caïque away from the hull with a long oar. Alas! I thought, the salt smugglers are escaping, on this night without a guard! But the Vogue-avant dragged me to the port side. We walked slowly between the sleeping bodies, clutching our chain with our fingers. The small boat was on the port side. We were there in an instant. There was not a clink, not a lapping. The Vogue-avant was from a land of silence. And, turning around the stern, avoiding the light of the lantern, we advanced in the wake of the caïque, which gently rocked our boat. We trembled in the shadows, afraid of a clumsy stroke of the oar or a call. But we saw more clearly the luminous fringe of the coast and the black beach where the sea broke its foam. We also saw the white fires, which was not their proper color, but that of great livid masses before which they burned. And we heard the singular crackling of the flames, as they threw out their yellow flashes. The red masks of the men of the caïque were made of their jackets with which they had wrapped their heads, and which they had pierced. A cable length from the coast, we saw that the livid masses were stacks of salt, lying behind, about ten fathoms apart from each other; in front of each one burned a fire, and beside each fire, we saw women throwing the king’s salt into it. The caique touched land while we were still in the surf. The salt-makers, masked in red, leaped onto the beach, and, each no doubt recognizing his faithful daughter, suddenly seized her; a second, and they had disappeared into the night. But we, at the sight of this unknown and desolate coast, of these livid masses of salt and these crackling fires, were gripped by horror; and the Vogue-avant, crying: Allah! threw itself back into the bottom of the boat, without wanting to land. While we hesitated, a flame leaped forth, with a detonation: it was the Coursier sounding the alarm. A long, sung moan echoed through the galley; our comrades were crying maluré, as at the second roll call, when the senior officers visit us. Distraught, we took up the oars again and headed back to sea. The boat whistled on the water; the shock against the hull made us stagger; we slipped into an open porthole. We could hear the sound of the feet of all the galley slaves on deck; we mingled with our comrades, heads bowed. Through the hatch of the tollard room, the four pale faces of the chained and bleeding salt smugglers appeared, twisted with despair; for their friends had forgotten them; and on the Bancasse, the high bench from which the chaplain says mass, and from which he raises the host for us, the faltering captain raised the helmsman’s lantern, while he paraded two by two, to identify the fugitives, our companions in the chain. Chapter 15. THE FLUTE. To Rachilde. The storm had driven us very far from the coasts where we were accustomed to racing. During long dark days, the ship had plunged, nose first, through the masses of green water crested with foam. The black sky seemed to approach the Ocean, even above our heads; the horizon alone was surrounded by a livid mark, and we wandered on deck like shadows. Lanterns hung from each yardarm, and along their glasses perpetually oozed raindrops, so that the light was uncertain. At the stern, the portholes of the helmsman ‘s cockpit gleamed a transparent, damp red. The tops were semicircles of darkness; from the greater blackness, in the gusts of wind, the pale sails emerged. Sometimes the lanterns, as they swung, reflected copper gleams in the pockets of water in the tarpaulins that covered the guns. We had been hunting thus downwind since our last prize. The boarding grapnels still hung along the hull; and the water from the sky had washed and massaged, as it flowed, all the debris of the battle. For in confused heaps still lay corpses dressed in fabrics with metal buttons, axes, sabers, whistles, sections of chains and ropes, with oar balls; pale hands clasped pistol grips, sword pommels; machine-gunned faces, half-covered by pea coats, tossed about in the maneuvers, and we slid among soaked corpses. This sinister hurricane had taken away our courage to clear away. We waited for daylight to recognize our companions, and sew them into their bags; and the prize ship was loaded with rum. Several barrels had been moored, both at the foot of the foremast and at the mizzenmast; and many of us, clinging around, held out our cups or our mouths to the brown jets that each pitching stroke made spurt forth, among the liquid snorts. If the compass did not deceive us, the ship was heading south; but the darkness and the deserted horizon gave us no reference point for the nautical chart. Once we thought we saw obscure elevations to the west, another, pale beaches; but we did not know if the heights were mountains or cliffs and the paleness of the beaches could be the pale sea beating against the breakers. At certain moments we saw through the fine rain foggy red lights; and the captain called to the helmsman to avoid them. For we knew we were signaled and pursued; and the lights were perhaps fire ships, or if we were skirting, without seeing them, inhospitable coasts, we could fear the treacherous signals of the wreckers. We crossed the river of warm water that runs through the Ocean: for a time, the spray was warm. Then we entered again into the unknown. And it was then that the captain, not knowing what the future held for us, blew the whistle for the muster. There, in the night, a few men holding lanterns, our troop gathered on the quarterdeck, and the captain-at-arms divided us into groups, and we heard dark whispers. The treasurer drew numbers from a powder bag, and announced our shares. Thus each received what was due to him from the spoils of our cruise, so much of the clothing, so much of the provisions, so much of the gold and silver, and the jewels found on the hands, necks, and pockets of the men and women of the plundered ships. Then we were made to break up, and we silently parted. This was not how the division was usually made, but near our island of refuge, at the end of the expedition, the ship swollen with riches, and amidst oaths and bloody quarrels. For the first time there was not a knife blow, not a discharged pistol . After the division, the sky gradually cleared and darkness began to open. First, clouds rolled in, and the mists were torn apart; then the livid circle of the horizon was tinged with a brighter yellow; the ocean reflected things with less sombre colours. A bright spot marked the sun; a few rays spread out in the distance, fan-shaped. The swell was orange, violet and purple; and men shouted with joy, because they saw seaweed floating. Evening fell under a heavy blaze, and we were awakened by the pale blue light of morning in the southern seas. Our eyes, unaccustomed to the warm whiteness, ached; and we rushed to the rails, without seeing anything, when the lookout announced: Land straight ahead. An hour later, the sky being a thick blue, we saw a brown line, at the end of the ocean, with a border of foam. We set a course for it. White and red birds skimmed the ropes. The waves carried multicolored wood. Then a moving point appeared to us: on the very opaque sea, under the incandescent sun, it seemed pink, and when it approached, we saw that it was a canoe or a pirogue. This boat had no sail, and it seemed to be without oars. It was, however, heading abeam of us; but, although we hailed it, nothing was visible. As we advanced, we We only heard a soft and peaceful sound coming with the breeze, so modulated that it could not be confused with the moaning of the sea or the vibration of the ropes stretched to our sails. This sound, of a calm sadness, attracted our companions to the two sides of the ship, and we looked curiously at the canoe. As the forecastle pricked the bottom with a large wave, the mystery of the boat was cleared up. It was made of colored wood; the oars seemed to have gone adrift, and an old man was lying there, one bare foot resting on the tiller. His beard and white hair framed his whole face; except for a striped cloak, the tails of which were folded over him, he had no clothing; and he held a flute in both hands into which he was blowing. We moored the canoe, without him wanting to disturb himself; his eyes were vague, and perhaps he was blind. He must have been very old, for the tendons in his limbs showed through the skin. They hoisted him up onto the deck and laid him out at the foot of the mainmast, on a tarpaulin. Then, still holding his flute with one hand against his mouth, he stretched out an arm and felt around him, feeling his way. And he put his hand on the confusion of weapons, chain balls, and corpses that were warming in the sun; he ran his fingers over the edges of the axes and caressed the bruised flesh of the faces. Then he withdrew his hand, and with pale, empty eyes, his face turned toward the sky, he blew his flute. It was black and white, and as soon as it sounded among us, it looked like a bird of polished ebony, speckled with ivory, and the transparent hands fluttered around it like wings. The first sound was thin and tinny, quavering like the voice the old man might have had, and our hearts were filled with the past, with the memory of the old women who had been our grandmothers, and of the innocent time when we were children. All the present sank around us; and we nodded, smiling; our fingers wanted to move toys, and our lips were half-closed, as if for childish kisses. Then the sound of the flute swelled, and it was a cry of tumultuous passion. Before our eyes passed yellow things and red things, the color of flesh, the color of gold, and the color of blood. Our hearts swelled, to respond in unison, and the madness of the days that had led us to crime whirled in our heads. And the sound of the flute grew louder, and it was the sonorous voice of storms, and the call of the wind to the breaking of the wave, the crash of ripped hulls, the howl of men whose throats are bleeding, the terror of sooty faces, who board with sabers in their teeth, the wail of rowed cannonballs and the burst of air from the carcasses of sinking ships. And we listened in silence, in the midst of our own lives. Suddenly the sound of the flute was a wail; there was heard the lamentation of children coming into the world, a cry so faint and so plaintive that there was a howl of horror. For we saw at one and the same moment, with eyes suddenly lit by the future, what we could no longer have and what we were eternally destroying, the death of hope for the wanderers of the sea, and the future existences that we had annihilated. We ourselves, without women, red with incident, blooming with gold, we could never hear the voices of the new children; for we were damned to the rocking of the waves, whether the deck danced beneath our feet, or our head, crowned with the black cap, danced on the rope of a yardarm: our life lost without hope of creating others. And Hubert, the captain of arms, swore death, snatched from the old man the ebony bird spotted with white: the sound died, and Hubert threw the flute into the sea. The old man’s vague eyes trembled, and his ancient limbs stiffened, without anything being heard. When we touched him, he was already cold. I don’t know if this strange man belonged to the Ocean, but as soon as he reached it, when we sent him to join his flute, he sank into it and disappeared with his coat and his canoe; and never again did the cry of a child being born reach our ears on land or sea. Chapter 16. THE CART. To Octave Mirbeau. “Do you have it?” whispered Chariot to his comrade, whose head suddenly appeared near the pole of the cart. The footboard gleamed like a square knife. The black bushes seemed to stretch out hundreds of arms. A gust of wind extinguished the lantern. “Who did this?” said the man—his low voice hurried. “Charlot, can you hear me? Why did you turn it off? I can’t see that shiny thing anymore… ” “Then come over here; what’s the matter with you?” Chariot held out his arms to him, and the man hoisted himself up by the wheel. “You’re in place,” he said; “I’ll touch the horse.” “Put him between us, on the bench; it’ll be safe.” They yelled, eh? The axle groaned; the beast’s hooves clattered, and there was a ringing of little bells hanging from the collar and the blankets. “Not that,” said the man; “good God, not that! Why didn’t you cut the bells? You can hear that in the night. I can’t stand that noise anymore. Enough of the knife you put after the cart. ” “What knife?” said Chariot. “It’s the moon doing that on the running board. Did they know, old people, that someone would come and take them away? ” “I’ve never seen them like that.” They were running here and there in the wallow as if in a pigsty. They put their noses to the four windows; they looked like pigs’ snouts through the skylights. He had his nightcap on, and the old woman’s white hair was hanging over his mouth. They were trembling and couldn’t cry out. They didn’t even grunt. One time I came in, they looked like the white rats they show in cages at the fair, who make their red eyes move. They raised their heads, of all types, with their backs, in the corners. –And when they heard the coins clinking? –I didn’t find it right away. Ah, bugger! It was rudely hidden. There were at least 350 piles of old smocks on top of it. I told them it was for you, your due, what… that we needed it for the embarkation, that you would send it back to them in red gold and greenbacks, when you had won, in the cattle, over there… all the salesmanship, all the salesmanship… Then
they put their two poor faces against each other: We can’t, they said, no, we can’t. They huddled against the wall like two frightened animals. –Were you hot, in my slippers? Huh? Your feet would have screamed; they wouldn’t have let you in. I always put them on. –For sure! He stretched out his legs in the bundle of untied straw, which was scattered under the seat. –They didn’t say anything when you left? –Cart–why are you doing that? Take away that knife; it’s cold… –But I tell you it’s the moon on the mounting block, old man. The cart emerged from the shadow of the hedges. The road ran flat under the moon, white and blue. The wind had risen to the higher regions, and the gray clouds passed quickly across the sky. The man began to sleep, and Chariot watched him as he handled the reins. His head bounced on his chest with every jolt. He had grasped the bench with his right hand and clung to it. The cart jolted, and the man no longer heard the shrill sounds of the bells. The horse fled parallel to the clouds. There were tall gray poplars dipping into half-flooded meadows, vaguely shimmering. The heads of the mutilated oaks had sprouted splayed branches like the overlocked fingers of a drowning man . The birches seemed bare, with white bruises. Narrow grassy strips trembled and bore at the end a clump of trembling reeds. Then the wind dropped and the clouds united with the West. The bent poplars complained. Tufts of mistletoe could be heard whispering to the oaks. The water in the flooded meadows rippled, and the marijuana being dragged along swayed anxiously. A breath passed over the strands of straw scattered in the cart and the little horse’s mane bristled. The collar was shaken, with all its bells. The rain fell, obliquely, sharply. Chariot suffered it in silence. The drops hung on his cap, and long, damp streaks marked his chin. When his forearms were wet, he felt a shudder down his back and felt the need to speak. He touched his companion. “What,” said the man, “it’s not day yet.” We have time. “It’s a squall,” replied Chariot, “a squall in the night. We’ll have some like that before we get to America. ” “Well, yes,” said the man. “Afterwards? Let me sleep. ” “I can’t,” continued Chariot. “All the same—the old people were beaten up—ah—it’s their own fault—but we’ll have a while, on the boat, before we settle down there. What did you take, tell me—listen? ” “You know perfectly well, Chariot, what I took. Everything you said. Here. I’m sleeping. I can’t take it anymore. ” “After all,” said Chariot, “I’m very wrong to worry myself. When there was none left, there’s still some back home. They know where to hide it, the beggars. I died in poverty, while they were getting fat on weddings.” Now it was their turn to worry . The sky was brightening in the east, and a cold gust swelled their clothes. The light quickly turned livid. The mists stretched over the flood. The water was the color of lead. Chariot saw his companion’s face, yellow and bluish on the cheeks and under the eyes, with a twisted scarf around his neck. His hand had slipped onto the bench and left his fingers on it. Chariot looked at the blackish-red marks and shook the sleeper. “Ah! Enough,” said the man. “Daybreak! What, are we here? What do you want? ” “That,” said Charlot, as if strangled. “There’s blood on the wood. ” “Well, I must have hit myself on the way up,” said the man, chewing his words. “Fingers,” shouted Chariot, “red fingers! You don’t have them… ” “And how would you have done? You were asking if they had yelled.” Yes, they were yelling, enough to bring down the whole police station. What, you wanted to leave with money? Well, you’ve got it. The ringing white package between the two men had fogged up in the rain, as if with wine stains. Chariot pulled the man, let go of the reins, and they both staggered onto the road. The man, half knocked over, held onto the iron step and swore. “That’s not all,” said Chariot, “where are my slippers?” “They must be in the straw over there,” said the man. “We’ll go see.” They searched both sides, but found nothing. Chariot’s white cheeks trembled. “You left them at home!” he shouted. “I don’t remember,” said the man. “Maybe I left them because I’d been splashing around in the blood.” He looked at his shoes. A reddish line divided the sole and the upper. “I’ll be recognized!” cried Chariot. “You left my slippers in the room!” But the man said nothing. He had taken a handful of damp earth and was wiping the tips of his feet. Chariot went around the cart and shouted: “There’s blood at the mounting block!” The shining footboard looked like an execution knife. They both knelt in the deep rut; and while the horse splashed them with its hoof, under the pale light of dawn, they patiently rubbed the iron edge with mud. Chapter 17. THE SLEEPING CITY[1]. To Léon Daudet. The coast was high and dark under the clear blue glow of dawn. The Captain with the black flag ordered us to land. Because the compasses had been broken in the last storm, we no longer knew our route or the land that stretched out before us. The ocean was so green that we could have believed it had just sprouted from the open water by some enchantment. But the sight of the dark cliff troubled us; those who had stirred the tarot cards in the night and those who were drunk on the plant of their country, and those who were dressed in various ways, although there were no women on board, and those who were mute having had their tongues nailed, and those who, after having crossed, above the abyss, the narrow plank of the buccaneers, had remained mentally ill with terror, all our comrades, black or yellow, white or bloody, leaning on the gunwales, looked at the new land, while their eyes trembled. Being from all countries, of all colors, of all languages, not even having gestures in common, they were bound only by a similar passion and collective incidents. For they had sunk so many ships, reddened bulwarks with the bleeding edge of their axes, ripped open holds with the levers of maneuver, silently strangled men in their hammocks, stormed galleons with a vast howl, that they had united in action; they were like a colony of malignant and disparate animals, inhabiting a small floating island, accustomed to one another, without conscience, with a total instinct guided by the eyes of a single one. They were always acting and no longer thinking. They were in their own crowd all day and all night. Their ship contained no silence, but a prodigious continuous rustling. Without doubt, silence would have been fatal to them. They had through the persons of all types of body time the struggle of maneuvering against the waves, through the calm the sonorous intoxication and discordant songs, and the din of battle when ships crossed them. The Captain with the black flag knew all this, and understood it alone; he himself lived only in agitation, and his horror of silence was such that during the peaceful minutes of the night, he pulled his hammock companion by his long robe, in order to hear the inarticulate sound of a human voice. The constellations of the other hemisphere paled. An incandescent sun pierced the great sheet of the sky, now a deep blue, and the Companions of the Sea, having dropped anchor, pushed the long boats towards a cove cut into the cliff. There opened a rocky corridor, whose vertical walls seemed to meet in the air, so high were they; but instead of feeling a subterranean freshness there, the Captain and his companions experienced the oppression of an extraordinary heat, and the rivulets of sea water which filtered into the sand dried up so quickly that the entire beach crackled with the floor of the corridor. This rocky passage opened out into a flat and barren countryside, hilly on the horizon. A few clumps of gray plants grew on the slope of the cliff; tiny, brown, round or long beasts , with thin, gauzy wings, or tall, articulated legs, buzzed around the hairy leaves or made the earth tremble in certain places. Inanimate nature had lost the moving life of the sea and the crackling of the sand; the open air was stopped by the barrier of the cliffs; the plants seemed fixed like rock, and the brown beasts, creeping or winged, kept to a narrow band outside of which there was no longer any movement. Now, if the Captain with the black flag had not thought, despite his ignorance of the country where they were, that the last indications compasses had carried the ship towards the Golden Land where all the Companions of the Sea wish to land, he would not have pushed the adventure further, and the silence of these lands would have terrified him. But he thought that this unknown coast was the shore of the Golden Land, and he spoke to his companions moving words which put varied desires in their hearts. We walked with bowed heads, suffering from the calm; for the horrors of the past life, tumultuous, rose within us. At the end of the plain we encountered a rampart of sparkling golden sand . A cry rose from the already dry lips of the Companions of the Sea; a sudden cry, which died suddenly, as if strangled in the air, because in this country where the silence seemed to increase, there was no longer an echo. The Captain thinking that this gold-bearing land was richer beyond the sandbanks, the Companions climbed with difficulty; the ground was slipping away beneath our feet. And on the other side, we had a strange surprise; for the sand rampart was the buttress of the walls of a city, where gigantic staircases descended from the guard road. Not a vital sound rose from the heart of this immense city. Our footsteps rang out as we passed over the marble slabs, and the sound died away. The city was not dead, for the streets were full of carts, men, and animals: pale bakers carrying round loaves, butchers holding red oxen breasts above their heads , bricklayers bent over flat carts where the rows of glittering bricks crisscrossed, fishmongers with their stalls, salt-meat sellers, high-turned up, with straw hats pinned on the crowns of their heads, slave porters kneeling under litters draped in fabrics with metal flowers, runners stopped, veiled women still pushing back the fold that covered their eyes, horses rearing up, or pulling, gloomily, in a team with heavy chains, dogs with raised muzzles or teeth to the wall. Now all these figures were motionless, as in the gallery of a sculptor who is kneading wax statues; Their movement was the intense gesture of life, suddenly stopped; they were distinguished from the living only by this immobility and by their color. For those who had had colored faces had become completely red, their flesh injected; and those who had been pale had become livid, the blood having fled to the heart; and those whose faces had once been dark now presented a fixed ebony face; and those who had had skin tanned in the sun, had suddenly yellowed, and their cheeks were lemon-colored; so that among these red, white, black and yellow men, the Companions of the Sea passed like living and active beings in the midst of a gathering of dead peoples. The terrible calm of this city made us quicken our steps, wave our arms, shout confused words, laugh, cry, nod our heads like lunatics; we thought that one of these men who had been in the flesh would perhaps answer us; We thought that this artificial agitation would stop our sinister reflections; we thought we would free ourselves from the curse of silence. But the great abandoned doors yawned on our path; the windows were like closed eyes; the watchtowers on the roofs stretched indolently towards the sky. The air seemed to have the weight of a corporeal thing; the birds, hovering over the streets, at the edge of the walls, between the pilasters, the flies, motionless and suspended, seemed like variegated beasts imprisoned in a block of crystal. And the drowsiness of this sleeping city put a profound weariness in our limbs. The horror of silence enveloped us. We who sought in active life the forgetting of our crimes, we who drank the water of Lethe, tinged with narcotic poisons and blood, we who pushed from wave to wave on the breaking sea an ever-new existence, we were subjected in a few moments by invincible bonds. Now, the silence that seized us made the Companions of the Sea delirious. And among the four-colored peoples who stared at us fixedly, motionless, they chose in their frightened flight each the memory of his distant homeland; those of Asia embraced the yellow men, and had their saffron color of impure wax; and those of Africa seized the black men, and became dark as ebony; and those of the country beyond Atlantis embraced the red men and were statues of mahogany; and those of the land of Europe threw their arms around the white men and their faces became the color of virgin wax. But I, the Captain with the black flag, who have no homeland, nor memories that can make me suffer silence while my thoughts watch, I rushed terrified far from the Companions of the Sea, out of the sleeping city; and despite the sleep and the terrible weariness that overtakes me, I will try to find again, through the undulations of the golden sand, the green Ocean that eternally stirs and shakes its foam. Chapter 18. THE BLUE LAND. To Oscar Wilde. In a provincial town that I will never be able to find again, the rising streets are old and the houses clad in slate. The rain runs along the sculpted stilts and its drops fall in the same place, with the same sound. The small round windows are sunk into the walls, as if to protect themselves from blows. There is nothing bold among these alleys but the ivy at the tips of the doors and the moss at the crests of the walls: for the dark, shiny leaves of the ivy advance their teeth, and the moss dares to envelop the large exterior stones in its yellow velvet—but the beings are as fleeting as the shadows of smoke. There are still reddish lanterns attached to the lintels, and thin candles in the tin candlesticks, and bundles of sulfur matches, and small panes full of shadow and dust behind which sleep strange little flasks where the liquors were once green and blue. Frowning cornets tremble at the windowpanes, and sometimes one glimpses pale children’s faces and frail fingers waving a discolored puppet, a wooden goose, or a half-colored ball. There, one winter evening, under a black porch, a small cold hand slipped into mine, and a child’s voice whispered in my ear: Come! We climbed a staircase whose steps wobbled; it was twisted into a spiral and a rope served as a banister; the windows were moon-yellow and a solitary door swung, agitated by the wind. The small cold hand clasped my wrist. When we entered the room, closed with four loose boards, with a string latch, a rustling candle was lit and stuck in a bottle. Beside me, holding my hand, was a girl of thirteen; her fine gold-colored hair fell on her shoulders and her black eyes shone with satisfaction. But she was small and petite, and her skin had the shade that hunger gives. “My name is Maïe,” she said, and, holding out her finger, “Weren’t you afraid , you awful monster, when I took your hand?” Then she led me around the room. “Hello, my beautiful mirror,” she said; “you’re a little broken, but that doesn’t matter. Here’s a very kind friend I’d like to introduce to you.” “Hello, my ugly table, which has only three legs; you’re ugly, but I love you all the same.” “Hello, my pitcher, which no longer has a mouth; that won’t stop me from kissing you to drink your water. ” “Hello, my home, I greet you in a trade union manner: today I have company. I had put, I think, a little money on the poor table.” Maïe threw her arms around my neck. “Will you please,” she said, “I’ll go get a large loaf of bread.” a six-pound loaf.–Goodbye, my home: be good while I’m gone; there’s an old picture book in the corner. She went back upstairs gravely, her chin on the flour-dusted loaf, both arms under it, and her hands holding her swollen apron. She rolled everything on the floor. You see, she said, I bought some chestnuts; that way I won’t be in trouble; they fill you up, they nourish you, and I have enough for my winter. She put them away one by one, flat, in the table drawer, laughed at them before closing it, and sat down on the bed. Then she took the large loaf and bit into the crust; as she ate, her little face moved forward into the gap and she kept looking at me, to see if I was making fun of her. When she had eaten, she sighed. I was hungry, she said. And Michel too, probably. Where is he now, that rascal? You know, Michel is a very unhappy little boy, who no longer has either mother or father; he is awful; he is hunchbacked; he helps me make my fire and goes to get me my water; so he eats with me, and I give him some money, when I have some. We heard a clatter of hooves, and the string of the latch quivered. There he is, said Maïe. I saw a pale runt come in, his hands and nose black with coal, his short pants open to the wind: he stuck his tongue out at me and made a long grimace with his mouth. Come on, Michel, stay quiet, said Maïe. You’d better listen to the gentleman who is talking to you. Go quickly. Michel came up with the bottle of sweet wine I asked for. The little cast-iron stove had been filled and lit. There was a little demolition wood, still stained with cement. The chestnuts were roasting on the lid: Maïe had bitten them to give them air. They sometimes burst and Maïe scolded them: Nasty chestnuts, will you please not jump? Meanwhile she was mending the fine linen lining of a bodice. The needle passed through it with a soft screech. The light from the stove fell on her nimble hands and made the material shine. Michel, crouching, closed his eyes to the heat. “I sew, I sew,” said Maïe. “I’ll have five sous. No, is it well paid? Give me a little sweet wine, monster. Drink the bottom: I want to be neither married nor hanged. ” In her childish language she told me her life story. She knew neither good nor bad. She had wandered the countryside, with horrible boys, to play a part. At nine, she was a princess in a barn, barefoot in the straw, and a crown of gold paper on her head. She still knew lines from her roles, and recited them to me. Oh! there was a beautiful play, she said. It was called, I think, the Blue Country. We didn’t see that it was blue, but we imagined it, you know. The mountains were blue, the trees blue, the marijuana blue, and the animals blue. And I said: Prince, this is the palace of the king my father; it is made of strong steel and the door of red iron , guarded by a dragon with three mouths. If you want to have my hand… Whoo–it’s a chestnut that just jumped out. Michel, why don’t you peel the chestnuts instead of sleeping. Is it true that there is a blue country? I’m sure I would be there; but they put in prison all the boys who played with me. They say they were stealing from houses. One day a guard came, and he told them, and he told them… never mind, I don’t remember anymore–but I haven’t seen them again.
And since then I’ve lived in town; but it’s sad. It rains all the time. All you see are slates and little black shops. So she chatted; then she got angry: Michel, I told you not to dirty the room with your peelings. Pick them up. Oh, you rascal! Here! She took off a boot and threw it at his head. His face was red, his eyes sparkling. “You can’t imagine how mean he is. I put up with him!” However, I had to leave the little Maie; but I promised to come back. I I saw her every day, and she sewed constantly, in front of her stove. Now she was putting together unusual costumes, with colored rags. Her skin was coming back to life; Maïe was finally eating. But she was becoming sad, as the misery went away. She watched the rain fall. Monster, ugly monster, she said, with empty eyes and soft lips. Once, half-opening the door, I saw her in front of the broken glass, her golden hair on her barely formed breasts, a paper crown cut with scissors on her head. When she heard me, she hid it. Michel is wicked, she said: he would make a fine dragon. Winter was coming to an end. The sky was still dark, but a few rays of light made the edge of the slates shine. The rain was falling less heavily. One evening I found the room empty. There was no longer any table, chair, stove, or jug. Looking out the window, it seemed to me that contorted shoulders disappeared into the back of the courtyard. And, by the light of the cellar rat I used to climb the stairs, I saw a sign pinned to the wall, with these words written in large letters: GOOD EVENING, MY HOME. MAÏE AND MICHEL HAVE LEFT FOR THE BLUE COUNTRY. Chapter 19. RETURN HOME. To Catulle Mendès. It was a Sunday afternoon and the bells were ringing. The sun
lit up half the streets leading up to the dance. One could see groups of girls with their hair tied, a ribbon around their necks, with the knot turned to the side; they laughed and chattered, holding arms. Passing in front of the municipal guard, they saluted him mockingly and entered the dance hall. The harsh light falling from the ceiling exaggerated the pallor of the women’s faces. They turned in pairs in the large square around which a band of men crowded together. On the benches, in the area reserved for dancing, entire families were seated, the mothers, wrapped in a black kerchief, sometimes holding a child in their arms; little boys and girls of three or four years old who sucked barley sugars or who, clinging to the skirts, stared wide-eyed. From time to time a girl, twisting the tail of her dress, came and sat down again near them. One, with her mass of chestnut hair pulled back into a helmet crest, her bust straight, her shoulders full, carried her head like an empress, with a hooked nose, an arched mouth, a smile full of defiance. She danced the quadrille, barely lifting her petticoat with two fingers and passed among the entrechats of the dancers, her mask pale. She seemed unaware of all the gestures and all the provocations, and her slight swaying on her hips was a greeting barely consented to by her pride. Suddenly there was a great tumult in the room. An army of newcomers had invaded the entrance. They were dressed in the strangest way and seemed to have come from the fair on the Boulevard Rochechouart. At the head marched a clown wearing a top hat that was too low; his colored face was completely hairless, and his thin mouth dipped at the corners to the creases of his cheeks. He wore a long yellow coat with leopard print, the buttons of which were a multitude of small mirrors. Then came confusedly blue and red clowns; white Pierrots with eyes blackened by flour; wrestlers with loose singlets, leather underpants, tattooed arms, and fur bracelets on their wrists and ankles; ballerinas whose gauze skirts were strewn with black and gold cutouts; harlequins molded in tights made of multicolored diamonds, with leather belts, open shoes; they had nervous limbs, lashed the air with a bat, and, under their bicorne, a cloth mask, through the holes of which their eyes sparkled, made their faces mocking; shouters of spiel, with multicolored greatcoats; bankers and goblet players, showmen of the match, weight makers, tightrope walkers and jugglers, dwarves and dwarves, secret sellers, tooth pullers, jokers and straw hats. And among this crowd there was a strange little creature who could have been twenty-five or sixty years old, who wriggled her developed torso on a pair of too-short legs, and waddled like a gosling. Finally, a troop of Turkish women, blond and brunette, had rushed onto the dance floor; they waved their wide satin trousers, made them puff out, raised their arms, a little yellow, shook their short jackets, their fingers hooked in their large belts, and clashed all the jingling coins and the tinsel of their hair. One, dressed all in red, with gold sequins on her forehead, had black hair in curls; she was supple and began to dance immediately, her head bent. She smiled at the advances, brazenly folded her hands, raised her leg in a rowdy way, shrugged her shoulders for a Carmen who was doing the splits at one end of the room, gave sharp blows with the back of her hand to the arms of those who were not paying attention to the figures of the quadrille, spoke with a lisp, her nose turned up in the wind, and sought the glances of the clown covered in small mirrors. And, on the other side, wearing a helmet of her hair, with her large calm eyes, her thin-bladed nose, her imperial profile, her sober movements, the proud dancer continued the quadrille. The clown saw her at once, tacked towards her and, facing her, launched extraordinary kicks, while her arms spread and lowered like the sails of a mill. She looked at him with great composure, while the little red Oriental girl threw him furious glances. Finally, as the music of the quadrille ceased, the clown seized the pale dancer by the waist and carried her to the back of the room, where, under a sort of vault, drinks were being served at wooden tables. She did not cry out, she made no effort to free herself: but she quickly whipped her fingers across the clown’s grimacing face. She let herself sit down on a bench without saying a word, dipped her lips in a glass of punch, and stared into the distance at a mysterious point above the clown’s head, who was spreading his sleeves, flapping his spring-loaded hat, blinking his eyes, and sparkling with all his mirrors. Meanwhile, the brunette, in her red jacket and trousers, had fled towards the entrance, shaken by great sobs. She kept saying: “I want to go, I want to go!” Then she collapsed onto a chair in front of a small painted table: her tears were making black streams in the rice powder that covered her face, and she was tearing her handkerchief with her teeth. I was there, and I tried to speak to her to console her. But she pushed me away with both arms and continued to sob; her shoulders were heaving in fits and starts because of the hiccups, and she buried her face in her hands. Finally, amidst her tears, she told me that she loved that clown madly—but that his behavior clearly proved that he was ungrateful; then she became angry and shouted insults; then she wept again; and she kept shaking her head, saying: I want to go away, I want to go away! Finally, she poured out her heart, and this is what she said: I’ve had enough of your Paris, which eats, devours, vomits everything; The houses are full of women who are dying and men who exploit them; all the hotels are terrible dens; all the cafes are lairs where some beast is lying in wait for you. When you are having fun, you have painted wood or gas on your head; when you laugh, you splash your powder and crack your paint; when you cry, you have nowhere to lay your head without hearing a snigger. If you are sick, you find the hospital with its white beds that already look like shrouds. You You are soiled before you have loved; and if you love, another betrays you. The streets are full of people starving for bread and love. They steal everywhere here. They steal from your pocket and they steal from your heart. Nobody has anything secure; nothing is solid, not even your clothes (she was tearing her suit to shreds). Nobody pities you; neither the men who laugh, nor the women who are angry with you, nor the terrible children, crueler than all. I saw a woman, one winter night, under a carriage entrance, with a troop of young people mocking her, and the unfortunate woman wept and wept. There is no time to feel pity. Hardly any time to inspire pity. You pass from the lounge of a café to the sidewalk of the storefront, and then to the pile that the sweepers remove in the morning. It’s done very quickly: three years, four, years–in the basket, all that! I want to go away. I’ll go back home, to the country. I asked her what she was, over there. “What am I? A pig keeper, with all due respect. Ah! How I ‘m going to have fun! Don’t you know? We have a blue sky above our heads, good air, good water, good bread. There’s Piârre who will give me milk . We’ll catch cicadas in the fields. We’ll weave cages for them, in the shade. We’ll whip all our animals, especially the black and white ones, which have twisted tails and are gluttons. We’ll see the sunset. We’ll be covered in mud, muddy, red, happy… ” And the odalisque, fleeing, reached the door and disappeared. Then, among the chandeliers that were lit, among the cigar smoke that rose under the ceiling, I thought I saw Paris ablaze by an immense sunset , with bloody reflections at the balls and cafes, while on the white roads, a little pink under the last rays, one saw moving away, towards their provinces, lines of little pig-herds, returning from the capital, with handkerchiefs in their eyes and bundles on their shoulders. Chapter 20. CRUCHETTE. To W.-G.-C. Byvanck. –Do you still have a little water in the cache, brother? –I’m dying … said Wool-Leg. –Spear nib, replied Silo; but Gruchette will come. The stones seemed red, so much did the sun bloody the eyes. The heather was dry; the blue bells fell on the bridled moss. There was a small wood of dwarf oaks at the end of the moor, and the cries of the birds sounded fresh there. Sitting among the stony stacks, Silo and Wool-Leg, exhausted from the heat, were limply striking the pebbles with their lead sledgehammers. “Well, if you’d been Happy, Little-Leg,” said Silo, “you’d have been stuck on the road or at the bottom of a hole. Come on, the lords will be back; you’ve got arms of milk, poor little man. Here, I’ll smash your stone-face. Watch out, I’ll poke you in the pile. ” “I’m in pain,” said Wool-Leg, barely raising his pale head. “Come on, soldier,” continued Silo, “do people die in the stone fields? There’s Cruchette; there’s no fouant; everything is as clear as gold; we’re going to drink, at last!” Behind the piles of stones appeared the fearful figure of a dark-haired girl; she watched the surroundings, wiped her cheeks, and brought a jug to the shade of the grindstone where Silo and Wool-Leg were working. “Cruchette, Cruchette,” said Silo, “my friend is sick. Give him a drink of fresh water; he’s a good boy, he’s in trouble. I’ll leave you; if the sergeant comes, slip away by the ditch; I’ll go and mend the handle of my mace. ” Cruchette timidly slipped to the stones. With the bud raised over the pot, Wool-Leg drank from it for a long time; then he looked into the girl’s eyes. “And that’s all?” he said. “As you wish,” replied Cruchette. They weren’t watched much. The sergeants passed by every hour, knowing that men punished with prison preferred stone work to hunting platoon work. From morning roll to evening roll, with their caps pulled down over their eyes, they wielded the lead mace and returned to the prison at night. Silo, having served in Africa, knew the companies where one toiled under the revolver. He had a bony, tanned face, long limbs, and a fierce eye. Leg-of-Wool came from who knows where. He was weak, lazy, and cowardly. But his smile was tender, his eyes full of charm, and his gait very nonchalant. Silo and Leg-of-Wool became like two brothers. The older one, who had sweated in holes in the land of the sun, had great concern for the younger one. Usually, he doubled his work by breaking Leg-of-Wool’s stones. And when the one they had called Cruchette appeared, around midday, Silo led her to the little brother who had white livers. “Here, Cruchette,” he said, “and, spitting aside, ‘Little one, here’s something to drink, pass your sentence.’ And where did Cruchette come from? Like a butterfly flying around a candle, this girl with the pitcher wandered among the prisoners. She held out the pot and her mouth to them; she hardly spoke, and cried with the youngest. Sometimes she had broom in her hair, her hands earthy, her breasts scented with hay. If she felt her cheeks red, she pressed them against the brown belly of her pitcher to make them pale. She seemed to love her country and its stony moors. “Cruchette,” said Wool-Leg to him, lying in the ditch, one hand behind his head, “this is no life. I still have forty days to go. Do you want to leave?” Cruchette looked at him with wide eyes. “Yes,” continued Wool-Leg, “we’ve already talked about it with Silo.” The sea isn’t far away and he knows it. There’s a cove over there. We’ll start a canoe. We’ll go to England. On the docks there, we ‘ll find a job. I’ll learn the trade. It will take us to the Indies where the men are the color of copper. If we’re lucky, we’ll go to their mountains, which are full of gold, and we’ll do what we want. Cruchette shook her head. Two transparent droplets ran down her cheeks. Wool-Leg stroked her hair. Let me cry, she said; it will do me good. How do you expect me to go? My feet are bare. They’ll chase me off all the boats. I don’t know what the Indies are like; here I love my yellow flowers and my men who work among the stones, and I give them something to drink. But you won’t go away, little friend? Wool-Leg shrugged. The hot hour was passing. Silo whistled softly to warn that the sergeant was coming. The two of them, crouching, lifted the mace and brought it down with a roll of stones. Then the shadows lengthened. Voices were heard. At the command, men in sledgehammers stood up and came in a line to place their lead hammers at the feet of the squad leader. Then the column formed in fours to enter the barracks. Roll call was not called before returning the soldiers to prison where the full mess tins were arranged on the side walls. But in the evening, when the post commander, lantern in hand, counted his prisoners in the paved room, he was missing two men: Wool-Leg and Silo. They had rolled their sledgehammers and caps under the stones. Bareheaded, with open shirts, they followed the edge of the road towards the sea. The night breeze was blowing. Wool-Leg walked more slowly: “Come on,” said Silo, “you’re not in trouble anymore, my boy; you have feathers on your feet, like the Chouans who fly in the evening. ” The air was salty. They said nothing more, while their boots made the dry earth creak. The hedges, white with mist, were blackening behind them. On the horizon, dark windmills turned their sails still a little reddened by the sun. “And Cruchette?” said Silo suddenly. “Go on then—we’ll find some, in the Indies, Jugs with gentle eyes. But, my boy, now you’re no longer in trouble, there’ll be two of you. Wool-Leg didn’t answer. He was tired, perhaps. The moor sloped down, gray, toward the sea; you could hear the waves breaking. By the patrol path, Silo led his comrade to the little cove where a boat, oars retracted, was lying on the sand. As they approached, from inside the boat a female form emerged: “I’m going with you,” she said, laughing through her tears. “Jug,” said Wool-Leg, “come with us! Jug has come! ” “For me, my boy,” replied Silo in a deep voice. “For me, old man,” cried Wool-Leg. “Hey, we’re not on the rocks anymore, here. “We do what we want; I don’t need you anymore. –Cruchette, said Silo. –Cruchette, said Wool-Leg. And she ran between them two: for facing each other, near the boat and the trembling water, in the light of the rising moon, they had drawn their white knives. Chapter 21. BARGETTE. To Maurice Pottecher. At the junction of these two canals, there was a high, black lock; the stagnant water was green even to the shadow of the walls; against the lock-keeper’s hut, made of tarred planks, without a flower, the shutters flapped in the wind; through the half-open door, one could see the thin, pale figure of a little girl, her hair scattered, her dress pulled up between her legs. Nettles lowered and rose on the margin of the canal; there was a volley of winged seeds from the early autumn and little puffs of white dust. The hut seemed empty; The countryside was bleak; a strip of yellowish marijuana was lost on the horizon. As the short light of day faded, the breathing of the little tugboat was heard. It appeared beyond the lock, with the coal-stained face of the stoker gazing indolently through his tin door; and at the stern a chain unrolled in the water. Then came, floating and peaceful, a brown barge, wide and flattened; in the middle it carried a small, white-knitted house, whose small panes were round and scalloped; red and yellow morning glories crawled around the windows, and on both sides of the sill there were wooden troughs full of earth with lilies of the valley, mignonette, and geraniums. A man, who was flapping a soaked blouse over the edge of the barge, said to the one holding the boat hook: “Mahot, would you like to have a bite to eat while you wait for Recluse? ” “All right,” replied Mahot. He put away the boat hook, stepped over a hollow pile of rolled rope, and sat down between the two troughs of flowers. His companion tapped him on the shoulder, went into the white cottage, and brought back a bundle of greasy paper, a long loaf, and a jug of earth. The wind blew the oily husk onto the tufts of lily-of-the-valley. Mahot picked it up and threw it toward the lock. It flew between the little girl’s feet. “Bon appétit, up there,” the man shouted; “we’re having dinner.” He added: “The Indian, at your service, my countrywoman. You can tell your friends we passed by. ” “Are you kidding, Indian,” said Mahot. “Leave that youth alone. It’s because he has brown skin, miss; we call him that on the barges.” And a small, thin voice answered them: “Where are you going, barge?” “They take coal to the South,” cried the Indian. “Where there’s sun?” said the little voice. “As long as it tanned the old man’s leather,” replied Mahot. And the little voice continued, after a silence: “Will you take me with you, the barge?” Mahot stopped chewing his liche. The Indian put down the jug for a laugh. “Look at the barge!” said Mahot. “Miss Bargette! And your lock? We’ll see about that tomorrow morning. Papa wouldn’t be happy. ” “So people are getting old in the village?” asked the Indian. The little voice said nothing more, and the thin pale figure returned to his hut. Night closed the canal walls. The green water rose along the lock gates. Only the glow of a candle could be seen behind the red and white curtains in the little house. There was a regular lapping against the keel, and the barge rocked as it rose. A little before dawn, the hinges creaked with a rattle of chain, and, the lock opening, the boat floated further out, pulled by the little tugboat with its exhausted breath. As the round windows reflected the first red clouds, the barge had left this dreary countryside, where the cold wind blows over the nettles. The Indian and Mahot were awakened by the tender chirping of a talking flute and little taps on the windows. “The sparrows were cold last night, old man,” said Mahot. “No,” said the Indian, “it’s a little girl; the kid from the lock. She’s here, on my honor. Damn!” They couldn’t help but smile. The little girl was flushed with dawn, and she said in her small voice: “You allowed me to come tomorrow morning. It’s tomorrow morning. I’m going with you into the sun. ” “Into the sun?” said Mahot. “Yes,” replied the little girl. “I know. Where there are green flies and blue flies, which light up the night; where there are birds as big as a fingernail that live on the flowers; where grapes climb up the trees; where there is bread in the branches and milk in the nuts, and frogs that bark like people of all types of bodies, dogs, and things… that go into the water, pumpkins—no—animals that put their heads into a shell. They put them on their backs. They make soup with them.” Pumpkins. No… I don’t know anymore… help me. “The devil take me,” said Mahot. Turtles perhaps? “Yes,” said the little girl. “Turtles. ” “Not all that,” said Mahot. “And your papa? ” “It was Papa who taught me. ” “Too strong,” said the Indian. “Learned what? ” “Everything I say, the flies that light up, the birds and the… pumpkins. Come on, Papa was a sailor before he opened the lock. But Papa is old. It always rains at our house. There are only bad plants. Don’t you know? I wanted to make a garden, a beautiful garden in our house. Outside, it’s too windy. I would have removed the floorboards in the middle; I would have put in good soil, and then marijuana, and then roses, and then red flowers that close at night, with beautiful little birds, nightingales, buntings, and linnets to chat with. Papa forbade me. He told me it would damage the house and cause dampness. So I did n’t want any dampness. So I’m coming with you to go there. The boat floated gently. On the banks of the canal, the trees were falling in a row. The lock was far away. We couldn’t turn the ship. The tugboat whistled ahead. “But you won’t see anything,” said Mahot. “We’re not going to sea. We’ll never find your flies, or your birds, or your frogs. There will be a little more sun—that’s all.” “Won’t it, Indian?” “For sure,” he said. “For sure?” repeated the little girl. “Liars!” I know, come on. The Indian shrugged his shoulders. “You mustn’t starve,” he said, “all the same. Come eat your soup, Bargette.” And she kept that name. Through the gray and green canals, cold and warm, she kept them company on the barge, waiting for the land of miracles. The barge skirted the brown fields with their delicate shoots: and the shrubs, people of all types of bodies, began to stir their leaves; and the harvests turned yellow, and the poppies stretched out like red cups towards the clouds. But Bargette did not become cheerful with summer. Sitting between the troughs of flowers, while the Indian or Mahot were leading the boat, she thought she had been deceived. For although the sun threw its joyful circles on the floor through the small, shabby windowpanes, despite the kingfishers cruising on the water, and the swallows shaking their wet beaks, she had not seen her birds that live on the flowers, nor the grapes that climbed the trees, nor the large walnuts full of milk, nor the frogs like dogs. The barge had arrived in the South. The houses on the banks of the canal were leafy and flowery. The doors were crowned with red tomatoes , and there were curtains of chili peppers strung across the windows. “That’s all,” said Mahot one day. “We’ll soon unload the coal and come back. Papa will be happy, eh?” Bargette shook her head. And in the morning, the boat being at the mooring, they still heard small taps on the round windowpanes: “Liars!” shouted a thin voice. The Indian and Mahot came out of the small house. A thin, pale figure turned towards them on the bank of the canal; and Bargette shouted to them again , fleeing behind the rib: “Liars! You are all liars!” Thus ends the story of The King in the Golden Mask, an adventure full of mysteries and questions about identity and power. The story invites us to reflect on our own perceptions and to question what seems obvious. We hope you enjoyed this fascinating exploration of the human soul through the prism of fantasy. Thank you for listening, and don’t forget to subscribe to discover more intriguing and immersive stories on our Audiobooks channel.
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