The Last Fay Page 4

  That was the state in which Abel found himself at the age of eighteen; the sum of all his ideas was in the Cabinet des fées; his life was all contemplative and dream-filed, an ideal, and the force of his rich imagination and his Oriental soul went toward chimerical beings; he spoke in a language full of images and Oriental comparisons, and his intelligence was open to all superstitions.

  Meanwhile, the village that he often saw, without wanting to go there, since his father had forbidden him to do so—and he did not want to mingle with people anyway—had been subject to great changes with regard to the ideas that had once been conceived regarding the devil’s cottage. To begin with, when people learned of the death of the chemist and that of his wife, they began to lose a little of the terror that he cottage on the hill inspired; secondly, smoke was no longer seen coming out of the terrible chimney; and that change produced the greatest effect. Finally, the young people who had once been taken away to fight came back, with diplomas, and treated as “conscripts” those who said that the devil had lived in the neighborhood.

  Then people became ashamed of believing that they had been any danger in going to the chemist’s cottage, and Jacques Bontems, a sergeant in the cuirassiers of the guard, proved to them that the beadle was nothing but a fool but that his daughter had no peer in the world, and that, when one had “been at the tit” in Moscow, Spain and in Egypt, where there was “a damnable sun that dried out your noggin,” one knew all about the devil and girls...

  It is only in that epoch that the story we are telling really begins, and what has preceded it belongs to the category of things that the spectator needs to know before the curtain goes up—but now, the curtain is going up.

  Chapter IV

  What a Fay Often Is

  The last part of the preceding chapter introduced Jacques Bontems and Catherine, the beadle’s daughter.

  Now, you need to know that Grandvani, the beadle, was an important person. After being beadle he had become Maire, and the richest man in the village, because he had had the good sense to buy the property of the Church during the Revolution, in order, he said, that it should not pass out of the hands of the clergy. As he was a part of the clergy, he believed that the fire of heaven would not descend upon him, and he had acquired the property “because he had good intentions.” Privately, however, he promised himself to enjoy it to the full.

  One can, therefore, imagine how, twenty years later, he could be very well off, having bought a great deal for very little. His daughter Catherine was the prettiest young woman in the village, as he was the richest man, and she found herself the objective of the desires of a host of suitors. The girls in Paris did not always have as many.

  Jacques Bontems, whose acquaintance we have just made via the specimen of his language reported, perhaps too faithfully, in the preceding chapter, was a former cuirassier, dismissed without a pension because he only had twenty years of service, and he was eating through what remained of his army pay in order to put on a good show and marry Catherine. He had written to one of his former comrades, who was a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, in order that he could put a word in and obtain the position of the commune’s tax-collector for him, claiming that the man holding the position was a “perruque” who had “straw in his clogs”—an expression extracted literally from his letter. He hoped to marry Catherine if he succeeded in getting the old tax-collector sacked, and left no stone unturned to arrive at his goal.

  The sergeant was the best fellow in the world; he had won a medal at Austerlitz, but, having returned to his homeland, he wanted to support his red ribbon with his discourse, and attributed a credit to himself that he did not have. Let us say that Jacques Bontems was something of a braggart, but let us also say for his justification that he had been driven to it to some extent by the desire to exalt the glory of France and the ascendancy of brave men like him over other men, but most of all to make the Maire believe that in him he would have a powerful son-in-law; if you add to that a natural disposition to exaggeration, you will readily pardon him.

  Thus, he had no scruple about diminishing the number of our regiments at Bautzen and doubling the number of enemies; in saying that he had entered Stettin with fifteen cavaliers and General Lasalle, and that the sixteen had taken the city with thirty-two saber-cuts and a gallop. The peasants, in a circle, pricked up their ears and opened their eyes as wide as the coaching entrance of a Duc’s town house, when the sergeant told them that a clever little drummer-boy armed with his two sticks often made a tour of enemy advance posts and brought back fifty Cossacks with their horses, tack, lances, sheepskins and all.

  After he had said that it was ordinary to leap through the embrasure of a cannon, while it was being hauled back after having spat out its grapeshot, and take possession, as one of five, of a battery that was hindering the “little shaver” in his operations, he turned up the tips of his moustache, tapped the ash out of his pipe, shook his head and said: “That’s how one wins a medal!” Then, if one of his comrades made the observation in a corner that that was an act of courage that one only attempted with the devil in one’s body, Bontems, darting a masterly wink at him, replied: “Leave it out, old man! It’s necessary to maintain national morale!” The other, before such a grave consideration, maintained silence, and on his own behalf, outbid Monsieur Bontems.

  Thus, the sergeant, a man of five feet six inches, with a sun-tanned face and a martial stride, and the free and easy manners of our cosmopolitan cuirassiers, had succeeded in persuading the beadle that he knew great generals, Councilors of State, and even the Court, and that he had credit there.

  For a long time, a legal dispute had been going on between a neighboring commune and the one the Maire administered, over the wealth of the two communes that remained undivided. Each commune wanted to have more than the other, and for ten years had been going to court, obtaining decrees and edicts, and the affair was not over. The Maires did not have the means to go to Paris, to follow advocates, judges and ministers, and to spend enormous amounts on dinners, carriages and presents, and the communes even less, so the Maire, not refusing to believe Bontems’ discourse, asked him, as proof of his credit, to sort out an affair in which he was involved and which had only thus far got to the Council of the Prefecture.

  Jacques, as a prudent man, had begun by asking for time and was determined, in the interim, to makes such headway with Mademoiselle Catherine that she would fall in love with him. After that, he promised himself to handle the matter so well that the Maire could not do otherwise that marry him to Catherine—or, rather, propose to him that he marry Catherine.

  He passed off his correspondence with an office clerk as a correspondence with the chiefs, and as his comrade addressed letters to him in with the ministry’s seal, Jacques Bontems gave the appearance of a man of importance when the envelopes that he as careful to leave lying around were found. If he were able to obtain the position of tax-collector he would have crowned his enterprise with a complete success, and the entire region would be prostrate before his power. Would anyone even know whether he had paid the contributions, if, after such a fine exploit, he had been nominated as a député by the surrounding communes? Then, more than one of the expressions that was said to escape from representatives during the storm of important sessions would be heard on the legislative benches.

  The village was, as can be seen, prey to intrigues as difficult and numerous as those of the Marriage of Figaro. The tax-collector was the target of darts hurled by Bontems, who wanted his place, and he defended himself courageously; hence, parties for and against, speeches, hints, opinions and disputes. Jacques Bontems, however, put on a polite face toward the tax-collector, and the tax-collector toward Bontems; it was just as at Court: nothing was lacking except gilded clothing, fine language, carriages and the sound of ministries collapsing.

  Abel and Caliban floated over all these intrigues like the sage that Lucretius represents contemplating from the height of the clouds the earth and its inha
bitants, incessantly running after gold and fortune.

  The fortunate Abel lived in the magical world of goblins, sprites, djinni, fays, enchanters, princes, lovely princesses and enchanted gardens compared with which the terrestrial paradise was devoid of charm. He was waiting for a fay as the Jews wait the Messiah; he read and reread the tales, and after having read them he told Caliban that he experienced the desire to fly into the sky, to seize a gilded cloud and go to listen on the summit of a rock for the ethereal sounds that would betray the abode of the brilliant angels.

  He had imagined a fay, and adored her; when, one evening, a shooting star lit up and a long furrow of light shone in the air, he ran into the forest, to the tree where he fiery cloud had stopped, and he was desolate to have missed the fay.

  If, by night, a harmonious breeze slid through the foliage and caressed the garden, he shouted: “Caliban, my fay is passing by!” They waited; Caliban raised his nose, remaining bewildered, and poor Abel, after having searched or a long time, returned sadly. The following morning, if he perceived fresh flowers opening, he said that the fay had looked at his garden.

  Finally, he saw fays during his sleep; and, waking up with a start, he listened, gathering all of his force of audition, and mistook the soft murmur of the wind for the debris of the provocative and mocking laughter of an impertinent fay.

  One morning, he was sitting at the door of the cottage on the stone that served him as a bench; he was clad in a frock-coat of sorts and his Turkish trousers; His beautiful embroidered shirt, open at the top, permitted the sight of his lovely neck, and his hair, as curly as that of Antinous, gave him the appearance of a god of antiquity reading Homer to see whether the poet had depicted him accurately. The vine seemed to take pleasure in shading the chemist’s son with its branch; the dew was shining in the grass where his feet rested; there were flowers around him, and he wore them on his head.

  He was there, reading the story of the two children of the fay who wore stars on their foreheads, when he suddenly heard at a distance the light footsteps of a woman whose dress seemed to be quivering. His imagination working, he waited with a sort of anxiety for the person who was still hidden by a bush.

  He soon saw a young woman advancing toward him, simply dressed, her black hair escaping beneath a headscarf elegantly knotted about her head. Her stride was light and brisk. She had a red corsage and a white dress, and her face was shining with a dazzling freshness. She was pale; the roundness of her bare arms seemed polished, and her charming hands would have done honor to more than one beautiful lady. Her face expressed naivety, and a pure grace, without affectation, decorated her movements.

  She was coming up the path quite rapidly, but as soon as she saw Abel she stopped, contemplated him with a surprise mingled with admiration, and her gaze seemed to blush. She did not notice immediately the avidity that Abel deployed in the attention with which he was examining her, but she soon lowered her eyes, and appeared to deliberate within herself as to whether she would or would not go past the cottage.

  In the same way that there are certain men who, in their poses, their gait and the ensemble of their being, contain dignity and strength, there are women who combine to a high degree of perfection that which is woman, and who are surrounded by a cortege of seduction, attractions, graces and pretty mannerisms. The young woman had much more of that than was necessary to turn the head of a young man who had only ever seen Caliban, his mother and an old chemist at his furnace.

  After a moment of silence and examination, Abel launched himself forward rapidly; the young woman retreated, but the great beauty of the young man, and, above all, the candor that radiated from his entire person, ensured that she only fled as far as the bush. Abel followed her there and, taking her by her hand, which he felt trembling, he said to her in the enchanting tone of the most touching voice that one could ever hear:

  “You’re not a fay, because your hand is trembling; you’re blushing, you’re walking on the ground and you have no wand; but you’re as pretty as a fay...”

  The young woman withdrew her hand, and did not understand any of that speech, except that it was flattering. She did not reply, but she looked at Abel in a fashion to make him understand that she would not forget a single word of what he had just said, and that she would search for its meaning for a long time.

  “Come and sit down beside me on my stone,” he said to her, accompanying his words with an inviting smile.

  They went there; for a moment, silence still reigned, and it was Abel who broke it, saying: “I’d like to sit beside you often.”

  The young woman replied: “You do me honor...”

  Abel looked at her anxiously, as if to ask her what she meant by those words, but she continued, saying: “It’s you who live in this cottage?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “And you, you come from the village over there? I can’t go there, because my father and mother forbade me to; that makes me sorry now.”

  “Ah! You can’t come?” she said, with a naïve tone of regret.

  “No,” Abel replied, “But you can come to my cottage; it’s very beautiful. You’ll see the clothes of which father the enchanter made use when he lived on this earth; I conserve them carefully, with those of my mother the fay.”

  The young woman looked at him with a profound astonishment, and the more she looked at him, the more she admired the rare beauty of that gentle marvel of amour.

  “You doubtless have a name,” he continued, ingenuously, “like all princesses. Without knowing yours, I would name you Charme-du-Coeur.”

  “Oh!” she said. “My name is Catherine...”

  “What does that mean?” he asked, thinking that her name signified some quality, like the names of princesses in Arabic tales.

  “It signifies that I’m the daughter of Monsieur Grandvani, the Maire of the village.”

  At that moment, Caliban, who was in the cottage, hearing another voice than that if his young master, came out—but when he showed his hideous head the young woman was afraid, and fled.

  Abel watched her go, and stood up in order to follow her with his eyes. When Caliban asked him who she was, he told him: “It’s a young woman almost as beautiful as Gracieuse. How can I see her again? Perhaps she’s a fay in disguise...”

  As she fled, Catherine thought about the young man, and when she arrived in the village she had already reasoned sufficiently to promise herself to hide the encounter she had just had from everyone. The more she thought about it, the less she could convince herself that Abel was a human being; he seemed to her so dissimilar to the people she saw every day that she was include to think he had a superior nature. She never stopped thinking about that celestial face, the brilliant coloring, the freshness and naivety of Abel; that evening Jacques Bontems perceived that she was responding obliquely to his questions, and that she was distracted.

  For his part, Abel thought a great deal about the being, new to him, that he had seen that morning in reality. The tales of enchantment that he meditated had informed him about human sentiments; he was not unaware that “amour” existed, because every tale was based, like all the tales in the world, on two persecuted lovers. But the works he read never told him enough about that matter, and all that he could conclude was the axiom that a man loves a woman and reciprocally, that a woman loves a man. For himself, he could only love a fay, and the impression that the lovely Catherine had produced in him was far from attaining the perfection that a fay would have made him experience. The more he contemplated himself, however, the more he found that Catherine’s image was engraved in his heart.

  The next day, and the days thereafter, he ran in the morning to place himself on the path, returning to sit on the stone and wait for Catherine. On the fourth day, he saw her coming in the distance; she was walking slowly, while looking around.

  He went to met her and, bringing her back silently to his rustic bench, he contemplated her for a moment and then said: “Catherine—for I’ve remembered your name—you
’re more ornamented than the other day. You have a rose in your hair; your bosom is covered with a dewy fabric and your hands are embellished by a circle of gold...” He stopped, and looked at her, as if waiting for her reply.

  Catherine blushed more deeply and lowered her eyes; but, thinking about the ignorance of the young unknown, she raised them again and said: “In the world where I come from, we often change adornment for the people we wish to please.”

  “Can one please someone by means one’s clothes?” he replied, with vivacity. “Oh, how I’d like to have fine ones, if ever I encounter a fay!”

  “What is a fay?” asked Catherine.

  “A fay,” Abel replied, smiling “is a divine spirit that puts on human form and appears to us carried on a cloud. Fays are dressed in robes that resemble the azure of the skies; their face is as soft and scintillating as a star; they walk over flowers without trampling them and nourish themselves on nectar, like bees. They drink the dew, and live in the cups of flowers. Often, a fay glides along a branch and descends like a light and brilliant flame; she embellishes nature, reigns there as a sovereign, makes all those she protects happy, and gives them talismans against misfortune. Often, she even takes them to palaces with columns of gold and diamond, the paving stones of which are marble and the vaults like those of the sky. In sum, she surrounds you with a host of magic spells and happiness…and that enchantment falls on you from the sky, one morning or one night, unexpectedly.”

  “In that case,” said Catherine, “amour is a fay that one has in one’s heart.” And her eyes, resplendent with tenderness, came to be confounded with Abel’s in a gaze of admiration.

  “Amour,” said Abel, taking Catherine’s hand, “is a word that isn’t new to me, but I can’t conceive all that it expresses.”

  At that ingenuous remark, Catherine felt her heart swell. She withdrew her hand gently and put it to her eyes in order to wipe away the shiny tears that were forming there.