"My poor niece became insane," continued the physician, after a few
moment's silence. "Ah! monsieur," he said, seizing the marquis's hand,
"life has been awful indeed for that poor little woman, so young, so
delicate! After being, by dreadful fatality, separated from the
grenadier, whose name was Fleuriot, she was dragged about for two
years at the heels of the army, the plaything of a crowd of wretches.
She was often, they tell me, barefooted, and scarcely clothed; for
months together, she had no care, no food but what she could pick up;
sometimes kept in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal, God
alone knows the horrors that poor unfortunate creature has survived.
She was locked up in a madhouse, in a little town in Germany, at the
time her relatives, thinking her dead, divided her property. In 1816,
the grenadier Fleuriot was at an inn in Strasburg, where she went
after making her escape from the madhouse. Several peasants told the
grenadier that she had lived for a whole month in the forest, where
they had tracked her in vain, trying to catch her, but she had always
escaped them. I was then staying a few miles from Strasburg. Hearing
much talk of a wild woman caught in the woods, I felt a desire to
ascertain the truth of the ridiculous stories which were current about
her. What were my feelings on beholding my own niece! Fleuriot told me
all he knew of her dreadful history. I took the poor man with my niece
back to my home in Auvergne, where, unfortunately, I lost him some
months later. He had some slight control over Madame de Vandieres; he
alone could induce her to wear clothing. 'Adieu,' that word, which is
her only language, she seldom uttered at that time. Fleuriot had
endeavored to awaken in her a few ideas, a few memories of the past;
but he failed; all that he gained was to make her say that melancholy
word a little oftener. Still, the grenadier knew how to amuse her and
play with her; my hope was in him, but--"
He was silent for a moment.
"Here," he continued, "she has found another creature, with whom she
seems to have some strange understanding. It is a poor idiotic
peasant-girl, who, in spite of her ugliness and stupidity, loved a
man, a mason. The mason was willing to marry her, as she had some
property. Poor Genevieve was happy for a year; she dressed in her best
to dance with her lover on Sunday; she comprehended love; in her heart
and soul there was room for that one sentiment. But the mason, Dallot,
reflected. He found a girl with all her senses, and more land than
Genevieve, and he deserted the poor creature. Since then she has lost
the little intellect that love developed in her; she can do nothing
but watch the cows, or help at harvesting. My niece and this poor girl
are friends, apparently by some invisible chain of their common
destiny, by the sentiment in each which has caused their madness.
See!" added Stephanie's uncle, leading the marquis to a window.
The latter then saw the countess seated on the ground between
Genevieve's legs. The peasant-girl, armed with a huge horn comb, was
giving her whole attention to the work of disentangling the long black
hair of the poor countess, who was uttering little stifled cries,
expressive of some instinctive sense of pleasure. Monsieur d'Albon
shuddered as he saw the utter abandonment of the body, the careless
animal ease which revealed in the hapless woman a total absence of
soul.
"Philippe, Philippe!" he muttered, "the past horrors are nothing!--Is
there no hope?" he asked.
The old physician raised his eyes to heaven.
"Adieu, monsieur," said the marquis, pressing his hand. "My friend is
expecting me. He will soon come to you."
"Then it was really she!" cried de Sucy at d'Albon's first words. "Ah!
I still doubted it," he added, a few tears falling from his eyes,
which were habitually stern.
"Yes, it is the Comtesse de Vandieres," replied the marquis.
The colonel rose abruptly from his bed and began to dress.
"Philippe!" cried his friend, "are you mad?"
"I am no longer ill," replied the colonel, simply. "This news has
quieted my suffering. What pain can I feel when I think of Stephanie?
I am going to the Bons-Hommes, to see her, speak to her, cure her. She
is free. Well, happiness will smile upon us--or Providence is not in
this world. Think you that that poor woman could hear my voice and not
recover reason?"
"She has already seen you and not recognized you," said his friend,
gently, for he felt the danger of Philippe's excited hopes, and tried
to cast a salutary doubt upon them.
The colonel quivered; then he smiled, and made a motion of
incredulity. No one dared to oppose his wish, and within a very short
time he reached the old priory.
"Where is she?" he cried, on arriving.
"Hush!" said her uncle, "she is sleeping. See, here she is."
Philippe then saw the poor insane creature lying on a bench in the
sun. Her head was protected from the heat by a forest of hair which
fell in tangled locks over her face. Her arms hung gracefully to the
ground; her body lay easily posed like that of a doe; her feet were
folded under her without effort; her bosom rose and fell at regular
intervals; her skin, her complexion, had that porcelain whiteness,
which we admire so much in the clear transparent faces of children.
Standing motionless beside her, Genevieve held in her hand a branch
which Stephanie had doubtless climbed a tall poplar to obtain, and the
poor idiot was gently waving it above her sleeping companion, to chase
away the flies and cool the atmosphere.
The peasant-woman gazed at Monsieur Fanjat and the colonel; then, like
an animal which recognizes its master, she turned her head slowly to
the countess, and continued to watch her, without giving any sign of
surprise or intelligence. The air was stifling; the stone bench
glittered in the sunlight; the meadow exhaled to heaven those impish
vapors which dance and dart above the herbage like silvery dust; but
Genevieve seemed not to feel this all-consuming heat.
The colonel pressed the hand of the doctor violently in his own. Tears
rolled from his eyes along his manly cheeks, and fell to the earth at
the feet of his Stephanie.
"Monsieur," said the uncle, "for two years past, my heart is broken
day by day. Soon you will be like me. You may not always weep, but you
will always feel your sorrow."
The two men understood each other; and again, pressing each other's
hands, they remained motionless, contemplating the exquisite calmness
which sleep had cast upon that graceful creature. From time to time
she gave a sigh, and that sigh, which had all the semblance of
sensibilities, made the unhappy colonel tremble with hope.
"Alas!" said Monsieur Fanjat, "do not deceive yourself, monsieur;
there is no meaning in her sigh."
Those who have ever watched for hours with delight the sleep of one
who is tenderly beloved, whose eyes will smile to them at waking, can
understand the sweet yet terrible emotion that shook the colonel's
soul. To him, this sleep was an illusion; the waking might be death,
death in its most awful form. Suddenly, a little goat jumped in three
bounds to the bench, and smelt at Stephanie, who waked at the sound.
She sprang to her feet, but so lightly that the movement did not
frighten the freakish animal; then she caught sight of Philippe, and
darted away, followed by her four-footed friend, to a hedge of elders;
there she uttered the same little cry like a frightened bird, which
the two men had heard near the other gate. Then she climbed an acacia,
and nestling into its tufted top, she watched the stranger with the
inquisitive attention of the forest birds.
"Adieu, adieu, adieu," she said, without the soul communicating one
single intelligent inflexion to the word.
It was uttered impassively, as the bird sings his note.
"She does not recognize me!" cried the colonel, in despair.
"Stephanie! it is Philippe, thy Philippe, PHILIPPE!"
And the poor soldier went to the acacia; but when he was a few steps
from it, the countess looked at him, as if defying him, although a
slight expression of fear seemed to flicker in her eye; then, with a
single bound she sprang from the acacia to a laburnum, and thence to a
Norway fir, where she darted from branch to branch with extraordinary
agility.
"Do not pursue her," said Monsieur Fanjat to the colonel, "or you will
arouse an aversion which might become insurmountable. I will help you
to tame her and make her come to you. Let us sit on this bench. If you
pay no attention to her, she will come of her own accord to examine
you."
"SHE! not to know me! to flee me!" repeated the colonel, seating
himself on a bench with his back to a tree that shaded it, and letting
his head fall upon his breast.
The doctor said nothing. Presently, the countess came gently down the
fir-tree, letting herself swing easily on the branches, as the wind
swayed them. At each branch she stopped to examine the stranger; but
seeing him motionless, she at last sprang to the ground and came
slowly towards him across the grass. When she reached a tree about ten
feet distant, against which she leaned, Monsieur Fanjat said to the
colonel in a low voice,--
"Take out, adroitly, from my right hand pocket some lumps of sugar you
will feel there. Show them to her, and she will come to us. I will
renounce in your favor my sole means of giving her pleasure. With
sugar, which she passionately loves, you will accustom her to approach
you, and to know you again."
"When she was a woman," said Philippe, sadly, "she had no taste for
sweet things."
When the colonel showed her the lump of sugar, holding it between the
thumb and forefinger of his right hand, she again uttered her little
wild cry, and sprang toward him; then she stopped, struggling against
the instinctive fear he caused her; she looked at the sugar and turned
away her head alternately, precisely like a dog whose master forbids
him to touch his food until he has said a letter of the alphabet which
he slowly repeats. At last the animal desire triumphed over fear.
Stephanie darted to Philippe, cautiously putting out her little brown
hand to seize the prize, touched the fingers of her poor lover as she
snatched the sugar, and fled away among the trees. This dreadful scene
overcame the colonel; he burst into tears and rushed into the house.
"Has love less courage than friendship?" Monsieur Fanjat said to him.
"I have some hope, Monsieur le baron. My poor niece was in a far worse
state than that in which you now find her."
"How was that possible?" cried Philippe.
"She went naked," replied the doctor.
The colonel made a gesture of horror and turned pale. The doctor saw
in that sudden pallor alarming symptoms; he felt the colonel's pulse,
found him in a violent fever, and half persuaded, half compelled him
to go to bed. Then he gave him a dose of opium to ensure a calm sleep.
Eight days elapsed, during which Colonel de Sucy struggled against
mortal agony; tears no longer came to his eyes. His soul, often
lacerated, could not harden itself to the sight of Stephanie's
insanity; but he covenanted, so to speak, with his cruel situation,
and found some assuaging of his sorrow. He had the courage to slowly
tame the countess by bringing her sweetmeats; he took such pains in
choosing them, and he learned so well how to keep the little conquests
he sought to make upon her instincts--that last shred of her intellect
--that he ended by making her much TAMER than she had ever been.
Every morning he went into the park, and if, after searching for her
long, he could not discover on what tree she was swaying, nor the
covert in which she crouched to play with a bird, nor the roof on
which she might have clambered, he would whistle the well-known air of
"Partant pour la Syrie," to which some tender memory of their love
attached. Instantly, Stephanie would run to him with the lightness of
a fawn. She was now so accustomed to see him, that he frightened her
no longer. Soon she was willing to sit upon his knee, and clasp him
closely with her thin and agile arm. In that attitude--so dear to
lovers!--Philippe would feed her with sugarplums. Then, having eaten
those that he gave her, she would often search his pockets with
gestures that had all the mechanical velocity of a monkey's motions.
When she was very sure there was nothing more, she looked at Philippe
with clear eyes, without ideas, with recognition. Then she would play
with him, trying at times to take off his boots to see his feet,
tearing his gloves, putting on his hat; she would even let him pass
his hands through her hair, and take her in his arms; she accepted,
but without pleasure, his ardent kisses. She would look at him
silently, without emotion, when his tears flowed; but she always
understood his "Partant pour la Syrie," when he whistled it, though he
never succeeded in teaching her to say her own name Stephanie.
Philippe was sustained in his agonizing enterprise by hope, which
never abandoned him. When, on fine autumn mornings, he found the
countess sitting peacefully on a bench, beneath a poplar now
yellowing, the poor lover would sit at her feet, looking into her eyes
as long as she would let him, hoping ever that the light that was in
them would become intelligent. Sometimes the thought deluded him that
he saw those hard immovable rays softening, vibrating, living, and he
cried out,--
"Stephanie! Stephanie! thou hearest me, thou seest me!"
But she listened to that cry as to a noise, the soughing of the wind
in the tree-tops, or the lowing of the cow on the back of which she
climbed. Then the colonel would wring his hands in despair,--despair
that was new each day.
One evening, under a calm sky, amid the silence and peace of that
rural haven, the doctor saw, from a distance, that the colonel was
loading his pistols. The old man felt then that the young man had
ceased to hope; he felt the blood rushing to his heart, and if he
conquered the vertigo that threatened him, it was because he would
rather see his niece living and mad than dead. He hastened up.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"That is for me," replied the colonel, pointing to a pistol already
loaded, which was lying on the bench; "and this is for her," he added,
as he forced the wad into the weapon he held.
The countess was lying on the ground beside him, playing with the
balls.
"Then you do not know," said the doctor, coldly, concealing his
terror, "that in her sleep last night she called you: Philippe!"
"She called me!" cried the baron, dropping his pistol, which Stephanie
picked up. He took it from her hastily, caught up the one that was on
the bench, and rushed away.
"Poor darling!" said the doctor, happy in the success of his lie. He
pressed the poor creature to his breast, and continued speaking to
himself: "He would have killed thee, selfish man! because he suffers.
He does not love thee for thyself, my child! But we forgive, do we
not? He is mad, out of his senses, but thou art only senseless. No,
God alone should call thee to Him. We think thee unhappy, we pity thee
because thou canst not share our sorrows, fools that we are!--But," he
said, sitting down and taking her on his knee, "nothing troubles thee;
thy life is like that of a bird, of a fawn--"
As he spoke she darted upon a young blackbird which was hopping near
them, caught it with a little note of satisfaction, strangled it,
looked at it, dead in her hand, and flung it down at the foot of a
tree without a thought.
The next day, as soon as it was light, the colonel came down into the
gardens, and looked about for Stephanie,--he believed in the coming
happiness. Not finding her he whistled. When his darling came to him,
he took her on his arm; they walked together thus for the first time,
and he led her within a group of trees, the autumn foliage of which
was dropping to the breeze. The colonel sat down. Of her own accord
Stephanie placed herself on his knee. Philippe trembled with joy.
"Love," he said, kissing her hands passionately, "I am Philippe."
She looked at him with curiosity.
"Come," he said, pressing her to him, "dost thou feel my heart? It has
beaten for thee alone. I love thee ever. Philippe is not dead; he is
not dead, thou art on him, in his arms. Thou art MY Stephanie; I am
thy Philippe."
"Adieu," she said, "adieu."
The colonel quivered, for he fancied he saw his own excitement
communicated to his mistress. His heart-rending cry, drawn from him by
despair, that last effort of an eternal love, of a delirious passion,
was successful, the mind of his darling was awaking.
"Ah! Stephanie! Stephanie! we shall yet be happy."
She gave a cry of satisfaction, and her eyes brightened with a flash
of vague intelligence.
"She knows me!--Stephanie!"
His heart swelled; his eyelids were wet with tears. Then, suddenly,
the countess showed him a bit of sugar she had found in his pocket
while he was speaking to her. He had mistaken for human thought the
amount of reason required for a monkey's trick. Philippe dropped to
the ground unconscious. Monsieur Fanjat found the countess sitting on
the colonel's body. She was biting her sugar, and testifying her
pleasure by pretty gestures and affectations with which, had she her
reason, she might have imitated her parrot or her cat.
"Ah! my friend," said Philippe, when he came to his senses, "I die
every day, every moment! I love too well! I could still bear all, if,
in her madness, she had kept her woman's nature. But to see her always
a savage, devoid even of modesty, to see her--"
"You want opera madness, do you? something picturesque and pleasing,"
said the doctor, bitterly. "Your love and your devotion yield before a
prejudice. Monsieur, I have deprived myself for your sake of the sad
happiness of watching over my niece; I have left to you the pleasure
of playing with her; I have kept for myself the heaviest cares. While
you have slept, I have watched, I have-- Go, monsieur, go! abandon
her! leave this sad refuge. I know how to live with that dear darling
creature; I comprehend her madness, I watch her gestures, I know her
secrets. Some day you will thank me for thus sending you away."
The colonel left the old monastery, never to return but once. The
doctor was horrified when he saw the effect he had produced upon his
guest, whom he now began to love when he saw him thus. Surely, if
either of the two lovers were worthy of pity, it was Philippe; did he
not bear alone the burden of their dreadful sorrow?
After the colonel's departure the doctor kept himself informed about
him; he learned that the miserable man was living on an estate near
Saint-Germain. In truth, the baron, on the faith of a dream, had
formed a project which he believed would yet restore the mind of his
darling. Unknown to the doctor, he spent the rest of the autumn in
preparing for his enterprise. A little river flowed through his park
and inundated during the winter the marshes on either side of it,
giving it some resemblance to the Beresina. The village of Satout, on
the heights above, closed in, like Studzianka, the scene of horror.
The colonel collected workmen to deepen the banks, and by the help of
his memory, he copied in his park the shore where General Eble
destroyed the bridge. He planted piles, and made buttresses and burned
them, leaving their charred and blackened ruins, standing in the water
from shore to shore. Then he gathered fragments of all kinds, like
those of which the raft was built. He ordered dilapidated uniforms and
clothing of every grade, and hired hundreds of peasants to wear them;
he erected huts and cabins for the purpose of burning them. In short,
he forgot nothing that might recall that most awful of all scenes, and
he succeeded.
Toward the last of December, when the snow had covered with its thick,
white mantle all his imitative preparations, he recognized the
Beresina. This false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of
his army comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once.
Monsieur de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic
imitation, which was talked of in several Parisian circles as a proof
of insanity.
Early in January, 1820, the colonel drove in a carriage, the very
counterpart of the one in which he had driven the Comte and Comtesse
de Vandieres from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses, too, were like
those he had gone, at the peril of his life, to fetch from the Russian
outposts. He himself wore the soiled fantastic clothing, the same
weapons, as on the 29th of November, 1812. He had let his beard grow,
also his hair, which was tangled and matted, and his face was
neglected, so that nothing might be wanting to represent the awful
truth.
"I can guess your purpose," cried Monsieur Fanjat, when he saw the
colonel getting out of the carriage. "If you want to succeed, do not
let my niece see you in that equipage. To-night I will give her opium.
During her sleep, we will dress her as she was at Studzianka, and
place her in the carriage. I will follow you in another vehicle."
About two in the morning, the sleeping countess was placed in the
carriage and wrapped in heavy coverings. A few peasants with torches
lighted up this strange abduction. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke the
silence of the night. Philippe and the doctor turned, and saw
Genevieve coming half-naked from the ground-floor room in which she
slept.
"Adieu, adieu! all is over, adieu!" she cried, weeping hot tears.
"Genevieve, what troubles you?" asked the doctor.
Genevieve shook her head with a motion of despair, raised her arm to
heaven, looked at the carriage, uttering a long-drawn moan with every
sign of the utmost terror; then she returned to her room silently.
"That is a good omen!" cried the colonel. "She feels she is to lose
her companion. Perhaps she SEES that Stephanie will recover her
reason."
"God grant it!" said Monsieur Fanjat, who himself was affected by the
incident.
Ever since he had made a close study of insanity, the good man had met
with many examples of the prophetic faculty and the gift of second
sight, proofs of which are frequently given by alienated minds, and
which may also be found, so travellers say, among certain tribes of
savages.
As the colonel had calculated, Stephanie crossed the fictitious plain
of the Beresina at nine o'clock in the morning, when she was awakened
by a cannon shot not a hundred yards from the spot where the
experiment was to be tried. This was a signal. Hundreds of peasants
made a frightful clamor like that on the shore of the river that
memorable night, when twenty thousand stragglers were doomed to death
or slavery by their own folly.
At the cry, at the shot, the countess sprang from the carriage, and
ran, with delirious emotion, over the snow to the banks of the river;
she saw the burned bivouacs and the charred remains of the bridge, and
the fatal raft, which the men were launching into the icy waters of
the Beresina. The major, Philippe, was there, striking back the crowd
with his sabre. Madame de Vandieres gave a cry, which went to all
hearts, and threw herself before the colonel, whose heart beat wildly.
She seemed to gather herself together, and, at first, looked vaguely
at the singular scene. For an instant, as rapid as the lightning's
flash, her eyes had that lucidity, devoid of mind, which we admire in
the eye of birds; then passing her hand across her brow with the keen
expression of one who meditates, she contemplated the living memory of
a past scene spread before her, and, turning quickly to Philippe, she
SAW HIM. An awful silence reigned in the crowd. The colonel gasped,
but dared not speak; the doctor wept. Stephanie's sweet face colored
faintly; then, from tint to tint, it returned to the brightness of
youth, till it glowed with a beautiful crimson. Life and happiness,
lighted by intelligence, came nearer and nearer like a conflagration.
Convulsive trembling rose from her feet to her heart. Then these
phenomena seemed to blend in one as Stephanie's eyes cast forth a
celestial ray, the flame of a living soul. She lived, she thought! She
shuddered, with fear perhaps, for God himself unloosed that silent
tongue, and cast anew His fires into that long-extinguished soul.
Human will came with its full electric torrent, and vivified the body
from which it had been driven.
"Stephanie!" cried the colonel.
"Oh! it is Philippe," said the poor countess.
She threw herself into the trembling arms that the colonel held out to
her, and the clasp of the lovers frightened the spectators. Stephanie
burst into tears. Suddenly her tears stopped, she stiffened as though
the lightning had touched her, and said in a feeble voice,--
"Adieu, Philippe; I love thee, adieu!"
"Oh! she is dead," cried the colonel, opening his arms.
The old doctor received the inanimate body of his niece, kissed it as
though he were a young man, and carrying it aside, sat down with it
still in his arms on a pile of wood. He looked at the countess and
placed his feeble trembling hand upon her heart. That heart no longer
beat.
"It is true," he said, looking up at the colonel, who stood
motionless, and then at Stephanie, on whom death was placing that
resplendent beauty, that fugitive halo, which is, perhaps, a pledge of
the glorious future--"Yes, she is dead."
"Ah! that smile," cried Philippe, "do you see that smile? Can it be
true?"
"She is turning cold," replied Monsieur Fanjat.
Monsieur de Sucy made a few steps to tear himself away from the sight;
but he stopped, whistled the air that Stephanie had known, and when
she did not come to him, went on with staggering steps like a drunken
man, still whistling, but never turning back.
General Philippe de Sucy was thought in the social world to be a very
agreeable man, and above all a very gay one. A few days ago, a lady
complimented him on his good humor, and the charming equability of his
nature.
"Ah! madame," he said, "I pay dear for my liveliness in my lonely
evenings."
"Are you ever alone?" she said.
"No," he replied smiling.
If a judicious observer of human nature could have seen at that moment
the expression on the Comte de Sucy's face, he would perhaps have
shuddered.
"Why don't you marry?" said the lady, who had several daughters at
school. "You are rich, titled, and of ancient lineage; you have
talents, and a great future before you; all things smile upon you."
"Yes," he said, "but a smile kills me."
The next day the lady heard with great astonishment that Monsieur de
Sucy had blown his brains out during the night. The upper ranks of
society talked in various ways over this extraordinary event, and each
person looked for the cause of it. According to the proclivities of
each reasoner, play, love, ambition, hidden disorders, and vices,
explained the catastrophe, the last scene of a drama begun in 1812.
Two men alone, a marquis and former deputy, and an aged physician,
knew that Philippe de Sucy was one of those strong men to whom God has
given the unhappy power of issuing daily in triumph from awful combats
which they fight with an unseen monster. If, for a moment, God
withdraws from such men His all-powerful hand, they succumb.
ADDENDUM
The following personage appears in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Note: Adieu is also entitled Farewell.
Granville, Vicomte de
The Gondreville Mystery
A Second Home
Farewell (Adieu)
Cesar Birotteau
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
A Daughter of Eve
Cousin Pons
THE END.
Adieu by Honore de Balzac.
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