The Queen Pedauque Part 22

"Believe me, my friend, neither of us will die of it. Think, Jacques, that I am in want of plate and linen. Be prudent, do not show the feelings that agitate you, and I promise to reward you for your discretion, later on."

This hope softened somewhat my poignant grief. The innkeeper's wife laid on the table the lavender-scented cloth, the pewter plates, goblets and pitchers. I was very hungry, and when M. d'Anquetil, in company with the abbe, re-entered the dining-hall, inviting us to eat a morsel with him, I willingly sat down between Jahel and my dear old tutor. We were afraid of being followed, so after having put away three omelets and a couple of spring chickens we resumed our journey. We resolved, seeing the danger of pursuit, to pa.s.s every halting place without stopping as far as Sens, where we decided to stay the night.

My imagination went horribly to that night at Sens, thinking that there Jahel's treachery would be completed. And so much was I troubled by those but too legitimate apprehensions that I listened with but half an ear to the discourse of my good master, to whom every trifling incident of our journey suggested the most admirable reflections.

My jealous fears were not groundless. We alighted at the best inn at Sens, that paltry hostelry of _The Armed Man_. Supper hardly over, M.

d'Anquetil took Jahel with him to his room, which was next to mine. You may believe that I could not enjoy a wink of sleep. Jumping out of bed at daybreak, I left my chamber of torture. I seated myself under the waggoner's porch, where the postboys drank white wine and played the deuce with the servants. I remained there two or three hours contemplating my misery. The horses were already harnessed when Jahel appeared under the porch, s.h.i.+vering all over, under her black cloak. I could not bear the sight of her, and turned my moistened eyes away. She came to me, sat close to me on the stone, and told me sweetly not to be disconsolate, as what I thought monstrous was but a trifle; that one has to be reasonable; that I was too much a man of spirit to want a woman for myself alone; that if one wished for that one had to take a housekeeper without brains or beauty, and even then it was a big risk to run.

"And now, Jacques," she added somewhat hurriedly, "I must leave you, and quickly; I can hear the steps of M. d'Anquetil descending the stairs."

She pressed a hasty kiss on my burning lips, giving and prolonging it with the violent voluptuousness of fear, as the spurred boots of her sweetheart made the wooden steps of the stairs creak, and the intriguer was in fear of losing her Dutch linen trousseau and her G.o.droon silver pot.

The postboy lowered the steps of the _coupe_, but M. d'Anquetil asked Jahel if it would not be more pleasant to travel all four together in the large compartment, and I recognised that that was the first effect of his intimacy with Jahel, and that the full satisfaction of his desires had left it less agreeable to be alone with her. My good old tutor had taken care to provide himself with five or six bottles of white wine from the cellar of _The Armed Man_, which he laid under the cus.h.i.+ons, and which we drank to overcome the monotony of the journey.

At midday we arrived at Joigny, a neat and pretty town. Foreseeing that my ready money would be all used before we could arrive at the end of our journey, and finding the idea intolerable of letting M. d'Anquetil pay my part in the travelling expenses unless I was compelled to do so by the most unavoidable necessity, I resolved to sell a ring and a medallion, gifts from my mother, and went about the town in quest of a jeweller ready to buy them. I discovered one in the square opposite the church, who sold crosses and chains in a shop under the sign of _The Good Faith_. What was my astonishment to find in this very shop, before the counter, my good master, showing to the jeweller five or six little diamonds, and asking the shopman what price he would offer for those stones. I recognised them immediately as those which M. d'Asterac had shown us.

The jeweller examined the stones, and looking at the abbe from under his spectacles said:

"Sir, these stones would be of great value if they were genuine. But they are not, and no touchstone is needed to find that out. These are nothing but gla.s.s beads, good only for children to play with, or to be used in the crown of a village Holy Virgin, where they would have a charming effect."

Having listened to that reply, M. Coignard picked up his diamonds and turned his back on the jeweller. In so doing he became aware of my presence, and looked rather confused over it. I brought my business to an end promptly, and meeting my dear old tutor at the shop door I mildly reproached him with the wrong he had done to himself, as well as to his companions, by taking these stones, which for his greater guilt might have been real.

"My son," he replied, "G.o.d, to keep me innocent of crime, willed these stones to be false and a mere sham. I avow to you that I did wrong to take them. You seem sorry about it; it's a leaf of my life's book I should like to tear out, like some others not so neat and immaculate as they ought to be. I understand deeply all that is reprehensible in my conduct. But no man has a right to be entirely cast down when he is faulty, and just now, and in this special case, I think I ought to say of myself, in the words of an ill.u.s.trious learned man: 'Consider your great frailty, of which you make but too often a show; and withal it is for your salvation that such things should rise up in the road of your life. Not everything is lost for you if oftentimes you find yourself afflicted and rudely tempted; and if you succ.u.mb to temptation you're a man, not a G.o.d; you're flesh and blood, not an angel. How could you expect to remain always in a state of virtue when the angels in heaven and the first man in Eden could not remain faithful to virtue?' Such are, my dear Tournebroche, the only conversations adapted to the present state of my soul. But, after this unhappy occurrence, which I do not wish to dwell on longer, is it not time to return to the inn, there to drink, in company with the postboys, who are simpleminded and of easy intercourse, one or more bottles of country wine?"

I quite agreed, and we soon reached the hostelry, where we found M.

d'Anquetil, who, returning like ourselves from the town, had brought some playing cards. He played a game of piquet with my tutor, and when we resumed our journey they continued to play in the carriage. That rage for play which occupied my rival gave me occasion for an undisturbed conversation with Jahel, who liked very much to chat with me, since she was left to herself. Her talk had a kind of bitter sweetness for me.

Reproaching her for her perfidy and unfaithfulness, I gave vent to my grief in feeble or violent complaints.

"Alas! Jahel!" I said, "the memory and the image of your tenderness, which made but lately my dearest delight, have become a cruel torture to me when I think that to-day you belong to another person, whereas formerly you were mine."

She replied:

"A woman does not behave equally to all men."

And when I prolonged my lamentations and reproaches to excess she said:

"I am quite aware that I have caused you some pain. But that is no reason for you to plague me a hundred times a day with your useless moans."

M. d'Anquetil when he lost was in a bad temper and molested Jahel, while she, anything but patient, threatened to write to her Uncle Mosade to come and fetch her back. These quarrels were at first rather pleasant to me, and gave me no small hopes; but after a repeated renewal of them I became rather anxious, as they were always followed by impetuous reconciliations, which exploded suddenly into kisses and lascivious whisperings. M. d'Anquetil could hardly bear my presence. He had on the other hand a vivid tenderness for my good tutor, which he well deserved for his always joyful humour and the incomparable elegance of his mind.

They played and drank together with a daily growing sympathy. Knee to knee, so as to steady the table whereon they played cards they laughed, bantered, chaffed each other, and if occasionally they became angry, and threw the cards in one another's face, and swore at each other with such oaths as would have made the boxers of Port Saint Nicolas or the bargemen of the Mail blush, M. d'Anquetil swore by G.o.d Almighty, the Holy Virgin and all the saints, that in all his life he had never met with a worse thief than the Abbe Coignard. Notwithstanding it remained clearly evident that he liked my good tutor; and it was a real pleasure, as soon as one of these quarrels had terminated, to listen to his laughter as he said:

"Abbe, you'll be my almoner and play piquet with me. You'll also have to hunt with us. In the remotest corner of the Perche we will look out for a horse strong enough to carry your weight, and you'll get hunting clothes like the ones I saw worn by the Bishop of Uzes. It is, besides, high time you had a new suit of clothes; your breeches, abbe, hardly keep on your behind."

Jahel also inclined towards the irresistible charm with which my dear tutor influenced all mankind. She made up her mind to repair, if possible, all the disorders of his dress. First she tore up one of her gowns and used the pieces to patch up the coat and breeches of my venerable friend; she also made him a present of a laced handkerchief to use as a band. My good tutor accepted these little presents with a dignity full of graciousness. More than once I had occasion to observe that he was a gallant when talking to women. He took a lively interest in them without ever showing the slightest indiscretion. He praised them with the science of a connoisseur, giving them counsels out of his long experience, diffusing over them the unlimited indulgence of a heart always ready to forgive any kind of human weakness, and withal, never omitted any occasion to make them understand the great and useful truths.

We arrived on the fourth day of our journey at Montbard, and alighted on a hill, from which we could overlook the whole town, which appeared in a small s.p.a.ce as if it had been painted on canvas by a clever limner anxious to reproduce every detail.

"Look," my dear old tutor said, "on these steeples, towers, roofs, which rise up out of the green. It is a town, and without actually searching for its history and name, it is well to contemplate it as the worthiest subject of meditation we may encounter on the surface of the world. As a fact any town furnishes material for speculations of the spirit. The postboys tell us that yonder is Montbard, a place utterly unknown to me. Nevertheless I am not afraid to affirm, by a.n.a.logy, that the people living therein resemble ourselves, are egotistic cowards, perfidious gluttons, dissolute. Otherwise they could not be human beings and descendants of Adam, at once miserable and venerable, and in whom all our instincts, down to the most ign.o.ble, have their august origin. The only possible doubtful matter with yonder people, is to know if they are more inclined to food or to procreation. But a doubt is hardly permissible; a philosopher will soundly opine that hunger is for these unhappy ones a more pressing necessity than love. In the greenness of my youth I believed that the human animal is before all things inclined to s.e.xual intercourse. But that was a wanton error, as it is quite clear that human beings are more interested in conserving their own life than in giving life to others. Hunger is the axis of humanity; but after all, as it seems to be useless to discuss the matter any further, I'll say, with your permission, that the life of mortals has two poles--hunger and love. And here it is that one has to open ears and soul! These hideous creatures who are born only to devour or to embrace furiously, one the other, live together under the sway of laws which precisely interdict their satisfying that double and fundamental concupiscence. These ingenious animals, having become citizens, voluntarily impose on themselves all sorts of privations; they respect the property of their neighbours, which is prodigious, if you take their avaricious nature into consideration; they observe the rules of modesty, which is an enormous hypocrisy, but generally consists in but seldom speaking of that of which they think without ceasing. Then, let's be true and honest, gentlemen, when we look on a woman, we do not attach our thoughts to the beauties of her soul or the pleasantness of her spirit; when we approach her we have in view princ.i.p.ally her natural form. And the amiable creatures know it so well that they have their dresses made by the fas.h.i.+onable dressmakers and take good care not only not to veil their charms, but to exaggerate them by all sorts of artifices. And Mademoiselle Jahel, who certainly is not a savage, would be distressed if, on her, art had gained the advantage over nature to such a degree as to prevent the fulness of her bosom and the roundness of her thighs being seen. And so it is that, since Adam's fall, we see mankind hungry and incontinent. Why do they, when a.s.sembled in towns, impose on themselves privations of all kinds, and submit to a rule of life contrary to their own corrupted nature? It is said that they find it advantageous, and that they feel that their individual security depends on such restriction. But that would be to suppose them to have too much reasoning power, and, what's more, a false reasoning, because it is absurd to save one's life at the expense of all that makes it reasonable and valuable. It is further said that fear keeps them obedient, and it is true that prison, gallows and wheels are excellent a.s.surers of submission to existing laws. But it is also certain that prejudice conspires with the laws, and it is not easy to see how compulsion could have been universally established. Laws are said to be the necessary conformity of things; but we have become aware that that conformity is contradictory to nature, and far from being necessary. Therefore, gentlemen, I'll look for the source and origin of the laws not in man, but outside man, and I should think that, being strangers to mankind, they derive from G.o.d, who not only formed with His own mysterious hands earth and water, plants and animals, but the people also, and human society. I'm inclined to believe that the laws come direct from Him, from His first decalogue, and that they are inhuman because they are divine. It must be well understood that I here consider the codes in their principles and in their essence, without taking note of their ridiculous diversities and their pitiable complications. The details of customs and prescriptions, the written as well as the oral, are man's work, and to be despised. But do not let us be afraid to recognise that the town is a divine inst.i.tution. As a result, every government ought to be theocratic. One priest, famous for the part he took in the declaration of 1682, M. Bossuet, was not in error, when he wanted to form the rules of polity after the maxims of the Scriptures; and if he has pitiably failed in this endeavour, you have to accuse the weakness of his genius alone, which was too narrowly attached to examples taken from the books of Judges and Kings, without seeing that G.o.d, when He works on this world, proportions Himself to time and s.p.a.ce, and knows the difference between Frenchmen and Israelites. The city established under His true and sole legitimate authority will not be the town of Joshua, Saul and David; it will rather be the town of the gospels, the town of the poor, where working-man and prost.i.tute will not be humiliated by the Pharisee. Oh, sirs, how excellent it would be to extract from the Scriptures a polity more beautiful and more saintly than that which was extracted therefrom by that rocky and sterile M.

Bossuet! What a city, more harmonious than that erected by the sounds of the lyre of Orpheus, could be built on the maxims of Jesus Christ, on the day when His priests, no more sold to emperors and kings, manifest themselves as the true princes of the people!"

While, standing round my good master, we listened to his discourse, we were, without noticing it, surrounded by a troop of beggars, who, limping, s.h.i.+vering, spitting, frightening the sparrows, shook their swellings and deformities, spreading evil smells and suffocating us with their blessings. They struggled pa.s.sionately for some small silver pieces M. d'Anquetil threw among them, fell to the ground, and rolled in the dust.

"It's painful to look on these people," said Jahel with a sigh.

"'That pity," said M. Coignard, "suits you like a jewel, Mademoiselle Jahel; your sighs ornament your bosom heaving under them like a breath each of us would like to respire from your lips. But allow me to say that such tenderness, which is not less touching from being an interested one, troubles you inwardly by a comparison of yonder miserable beings with yourself, and by the instinctive idea that your young body touches, so to say, this hideous, ulcerated and mutilated flesh, as in truth it is bound and attached to them in as far as members of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In consequence you cannot look on such corruption of a human body without seeing it at the same time as a possibility of your own body. And these wretches have shown themselves to you like prophets, announcing that sickness and death are the lot of the family of Adam in this world. For this very reason you sighed, mademoiselle.

"As a fact, there is not the slightest reason to believe yonder ulcerated and verminous beggars less happy than kings and queens. It must not be said that they are poorer, if, as it appears, that farthing picked up by that crippled woman, and which she presses on her heart in frantic joy, seems to her more precious than a pearl collar is to the mistress of a prince-bishop of Cologne and Salzburg. To really understand our spiritual and true interests we should rather envy the life of that cripple who crawls towards us on his hands than that of the King of France or the Emperor of Germany, Being equal before G.o.d, they perhaps have peace in their hearts, which the other has not, and the invaluable treasure of innocence. But hold up your petticoats, mademoiselle, for fear that you introduce the vermin with which I see they are covered."

Such was my good tutor's speech, and we all listened willingly.

At the distance of three leagues from Montbard, one of the harnesses broke, and, the postboys having failed to bring rope with them, we were detained on the road, as the place of the accident was far from any human dwelling. My good master and M. d'Anquetil whiled away the time by playing and sympathetic quarrels, of which they had made a habit. While the young n.o.bleman was surprised to see his opponent turn up the king oftener than seemed possible by the laws of chance, Jahel, full of emotion, asked me in a whisper if I could not see behind us a carriage in one of the turnings of the road. Looking back to the place she indicated, I could actually see a kind of Gothic vehicle of a ridiculous and strange form.

"Yonder carriage," said Jahel, "stopped at the same moment as ours. That means that we are followed. I am curious to discover the features of the people travelling in that vehicle. I feel very uneasy about it. Does not one of the travellers wear a very narrow and high headgear? The carriage very much resembles the one in which my uncle brought me, when a child, to Paris after he had killed the Portuguese. It remained, I believe, in one of the coach-houses at the Castle of Sablons. It really seems to be the same, of horrible memory, because I remember my uncle in it, fuming with rage. You cannot conceive, Jacques, how violent his hate is. I myself had to bear his rage the day I came away. He locked me in my room and vomited the most horrible curses on the Abbe Coignard. I s.h.i.+ver when I think what his rage must have been when he found my room empty and the sheets still attached to the window by which I left to fly with you."

"You ought to say with M. d'Anquetil."

"How punctilious you are! Did we not depart together? Yonder carriage torments me, it is so much like my uncle's."

"Be sure, Jahel, that it's the carriage of some honest Burgundian, who goes about his business and does not think of us."

"You don't know," said Jahel. "I'm afraid."

"You cannot fear, however, that your uncle could run after you in his state of decrepitude. He does not occupy himself with anything but cabala and Hebraic dreams."

"You don't know him," she replied, and sighed. "He is occupied with naught but myself. He loves me as much as he hates the rest of the universe. He loves me in a manner--

"In a manner?"

"--In all the manners--in short he loves me."

"Jahel, I shudder to hear you. Good heavens: that Mosaide loves you without that disinterestedness which is so admirable in an old man, and so well suited for an uncle? Tell me all, Jahel-all!"

"Oh! you can tell it better than I, Jacques."

"I remain stupid. At his age, is it possible?"

"My dear friend, your skin is white, and your soul also. Everything astonishes you. That candour is your most striking charm. You're deceived by anyone who wants to deceive you. They make you believe that Mosaide is a hundred and thirty years old; but he is hardly older than sixty. They told you that for years he lived in the Great Pyramid, but as a fact he has been a banker at Lisbon. And it depended only on me to pa.s.s in your eyes as a Salamander."

"What, Jahel, do you tell me the truth? Your uncle--"

"Yes, and that is the secret of his jealousy. He believes the Abbe Coignard to be his rival. He disliked him instinctively, at first sight.

But it is a great deal worse since he overheard a few words of the conversation I had with that good abbe in the thorn bush, and I'm sure he hates him now as the cause of my flight and my elopement. For, after all, I've been abducted, my friend; a fact that ought to enhance my worth in your eyes. I was certainly very ungrateful to leave so good an uncle. But I could not endure any longer the slavery he kept me in. And I also had an ardent wish to become rich, and it is very natural, is it not, to wish for all the good things when one is young and pretty? We have but one life, and that is short enough. No one has taught me all the fine lies about the immortality of the soul."

"Alas! Jahel," I exclaimed, in an ardour of love, provoked by her own coolness. "Alas! I did not want anything else with you at the Chateau des Sablons. What was wanting for your happiness?"

She made me a sign to show that M. d'Anquetil was observing us. The harness had been repaired and our carriage rolled on again along the road bordered on both sides by vineyards.

We stopped at Nuits to sup and to sleep. My dear tutor drank half-a-dozen bottles of Burgundy, which warmed up his eloquence marvellously. M. d'Anquetil kept him company, gla.s.s in hand, but to hold his own in conversation also was a thing of which this n.o.bleman was not quite capable.