THE MADMAN

 

 

One evening in the month of May 1828, a post-chaise harnessed to two horses came into the courtyard of a hostelry in Toulouse. No one was occupying the exterior seat, reserved for a domestic, behind the body of the carriage. There were only two travelers inside. One was an old man, seemingly a sexagenarian; the other was a young woman who could not have been more than twenty.

The young woman signaled to one of the servants posted on the threshold of the hostelry to open the carriage door. The old man remained placidly seated in the corner in which he was huddled.

The female traveler got down first; an observer would have noticed her pallor and beauty, while she invited the old man, by voice and gesture, to get out of the carriage. She spoke in English, and from time to time a dry cough interrupted her solicitations. The man she was addressing seemed utterly unmoved by the invitations or the unhealthy condition of the Englishwoman. His head inclined over his breast, his clasped hands resting on his knees, his legs extended nonchalantly, he remained plunged in a profound preoccupation.

His companion looked around anxiously and pronounced a few words addressed to the hostelry’s servants. No one replied, and the proprietor, whom she appeared to be addressing in particular, replied in the most unmistakable Toulousian accent: “I don’t speak English, Madame.”

The expression on the worthy proprietor’s face enabled the young woman understand the meaning of the reply. She seemed saddened by it, raised her eyes to the heavens, pointed to the old man and explained by means of a rapid and expressive pantomime that he was ill and that he needed help to get down from the vehicle.

Two domestics immediately set to work. They expected to find a paralytic whom it would be necessary to lift bodily like a child. To their great surprise, the traveler opposed a keen and robust resistance to their efforts. He recoiled, pushed them away, and uttered cried of distress that the voice of the young Englishwoman could not appease. It was necessary to employ violence to get him out of the chaise. As soon as his feet touched the ground, he fell silent. The convulsive trembling agitating all his limbs gradually eased; his vague blue eyes ceased to express fear, but not suspicion. He looked around anxiously drew the large peak of the cap covering his bald head down over his face, and went to take refuge in the darkest corner of the vestibule.

The young woman, after having paid the coachman, rejoined the old man, passed her arm gently under his, and led him, not without effort and difficulty, to the apartment that had just been prepared for them. It was then evident how much the poor child was suffering. No animation tempered the mat whiteness of her complexion, except for the cheeks, which were covered with the feverish redness particular to invalids suffering from consumption. Her large blue eyes were shining with the sinister brightness also characteristic of that malady. In order not to succumb to the oppression that was stifling her, she was obliged to stop two or three times while climbing the staircase.

Having arrived at the first of the two rooms that were reserved for them, she left herself fall dejectedly into an armchair, and a few tears ran silently down her cheeks. In the meantime, standing in the place where the servants had left him, the old man was trying ever harder to cover up his face.

“They recognized me! They recognized me!” he said, finally, in terror. “Yes, they recognized me. They’ll tell everyone my name. They’ll repeat it with disgust. The local people will come to shout under my windows. They’ll break the glass, they’ll throw stones, they’ll curse me. Into the Thames! Into the Thames!”

“No, Uncle, those fears aren’t real; stop giving into them. We’ve left England; we’re in France; no one knows us in this foreign land.”

“No one?” he repeated. “No one! How can you believe, Diana, that my name is unknown in France? It was pronounced there with terror for a long time, when France was England’s enemy. Later, it was repeated with admiration, as in all of Europe, as in the whole world. Alas, that celebrity has changed to shame. France, Europe, the whole world believes and cries, like London: ‘Shame on him! Into the Thames! Into the Thames!’”

“Uncle, calm these dire ideas. Cast them out...”

“While I was sitting in the dock, before the Court of Chancery, prey to attacks of calumny and hatred, while England, to which I had devoted so much—talent, sleepless nights, fortune—played ignobly with my honor and called it into question, do you think that France remained indifferent and inattentive? No, it followed with interest the phases of that extraordinary case.”

“But you were found innocent, Uncle; the court rejected the accusation.”

“Yes, but the calumny hasn’t died. The lies and perfidious accusations persist in spreading everywhere, although the law forbids their loud repetition.

“Once, when I crossed the street in London, people stopped when they saw me and said: There he is, the man who defended the cause of noble England so energetically. He alone was worth entire armies: Walcheren, Spain, Algeria, Waterloo are there to prove it. Now, they turn away from me; my best friends pretend not to see me and, if anyone recognizes me, he nudges his neighbor with his elbow and says: Shame! Shame on that old man! He’s soiled his glory and his white hair for money! Oh, Diana, Diana, my poor Diana!”

He hid his face in his hands and remained in that desolate attitude for a few moments; then, raising his head energetically, he started pacing back and forth, and said: “And yet, I’m innocent, God knows, and the Court of Chancery recognized hat loudly. I’m innocent. Rather than submit to dishonor, I’d have preferred poverty and death. My God, how cruelly you’re making me expiate my renown, since a man who has done everything for is fatherland has been obliged to flee like a criminal, since a man who has conquered a glorious name must pay, at the price of his blood, for that name to be forgotten and erased!”

A slight sound was audible outside. He shivered and broke off.

“They’re coming,” he said, “they’re coming. They want to see me. They want to say to my face: Thief! Thief! Shame! Shame! Into the Thames!

He bowed his head, pulled the peak of his traveling-cap entirely over his face, and, walking on tiptoe, went to hide behind a curtain.

The young woman, who had not ceased weeping bitterly during this sad scene of dementia, was seized by a violent fit of coughing, accompanied by nervous and convulsive movements.

“My God!” she said. “My God, give me the strength to resist the disease that’s consuming me, until my care is no longer indispensable to that poor old man. If I succumb before the letter I’m going to write reaches England, if I have to die before it brings my brother to France, what will become of him, deprived of his reason and abandoned to the care of strangers?”

She sat down at a table and wrote the following letter:

 

My brother, hurry up and leave England; leave immediately for Toulouse; don’t lose a single day, nor a single hour. I sense that God will call me to him, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in an instant. And without me, what will become of the unfortunate old man to whom I’ve devoted my life? Alas, that sacrifice was beyond the strength of a poor frail and sick girl. I didn’t take long to succumb to it.

My brother, how cruel it is to see an old man suffer thus, whom one known to be as innocent and pure as anyone! God alone knows the dolors I have endured in the presence of that intelligence, once so brilliant and now extinct, that was once surrounded by all the honors possible on earth, and is now crushed by all imaginable evils! My uncle’s terrors have only increased; his dementia is taking on an increasingly absolute character, without liberating him from the obsession that is devouring him. Only one thought still remains in his burning head: that of the infamous stain on his honor made by calumny.

Come George, and come quickly. I shall succumb sooner or later under the burden of so such suffering. My uncle will remain alone in a foreign land, and to complete the misfortune, an unexpected incident is cruelly complicating the difficulties of his situation. The domestic who accompanied us and served as our interpreter, John, has suddenly disappeared, taking most of our luggage and all the money I possessed. I only have two hundred francs left, fortunately contained in a purse that I was carrying on my person.

I repeat, my brother, leave immediately for Toulouse. Adieu, I dare not hope that God will grant me the mercy of letting me shake your hand before dying. If such is his will, so let it be. I shall implore his mercy in heaven for you, and above all for the noble and unfortunate old man that I shall be abandoning.

Your sister, Diana.

 

After having written that letter, she sealed it, rang, and handed it to a domestic in order that it should be put into the post immediately. Then she took out a little pocket dictionary of English and French, riffled through it, and found beside the word for which she was searching, its translation. The servant called the proprietor, who read: médecin.

He immediately sent for the local doctor. The latter, when he came into the Englishwoman’s room, was almost frightened by the rapid and frightful ravages exercised by the malady on the young woman.

“Do you speak English?” she asked him, in her mother tongue, as soon as she saw him.

He replied to the question, whose meaning he deduced, with a negative shake of the head. Then he approached her in order to interrogate her, by means of sign language, about the suffering she was experiencing. The signs were almost superfluous, however, for the energetic symptoms of consumption spoke clearly enough for themselves. She pointed rapidly at her chest and the sky, as if to declare that she was not clinging to any hope of a cure, and that she knew how serious her condition was—after which she designated hr uncle with a gesture of despair.

The old man was still hiding behind the curtains, his ears pricked, his eyes fearful, in the attitude of a man fearful of some peril. When he saw the physician advancing toward him, he covered his face with his hands and murmured: “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! I’m not the man they’ve accused of such cowardice.”

As the insane man was expressing himself in English, the physician did not understand what he said, but it was easy to see that the old man’s reason was impaired. He went back to Diana; she started weeping bitterly. She could feel existence abandoning her, and could not even give the physician the instructions and clarifications necessary to ease the mental condition of the old man that she was perhaps about to leave alone in the world. He would die abandoned.

Several times she tried to make herself understood by recourse to pantomime, but her gestures were insufficient to express the delicate nuances of such a malady and the mental causes that had produced such a severe intellectual shock. It did not take her long to see that the physician did not understand. She wrung her hands in distress; a violent crisis became manifest and provoked horrible fits of coughing.

For ten minutes, the doctor, in spite to the care he lavished upon her, thought that she was about to die. Finally, he saw life gradually return—but he recognized that a further fit was inevitable and imminent, and that the first had left her too weak and exhausted for her to resist any further.

She read those sinister anticipations in the physician’s physiognomy, and, as if to take advantage of the time remaining, tried to get up from the bed on which he had laid her down. She fell back.

A second effort allowed her to seize a pen and a piece of paper. She then began to trace a few notes, in a faltering hand. The glances that she dated incessantly at the madman told the physician that the notes concerned the old man. When she had finished—and it was not without painful efforts that she had succeeded in scribbling seven or eight lines—she leaned toward the doctor, addressed a supplicant gaze to him, and handed him the sheet of paper. After making him understand that it was necessary to find someone to translate the instructions she had just transcribed, she let herself fall back on the bed, put her hands together, and waited for death.

The old man, seeing her lying there motionless, seemed to become anxious. He overcame his terrors and, in spite of the presence of a stranger, he advanced slowly and hesitantly toward the young woman.

It was not without a thousand precautions, and not without continuing to hide his face that he approached the bed and knelt down beside Diana’s pillow. She seemed to be reanimated on seeing the object of her devotion and her dolor so close. She reached out to her uncle, took the old man’s hand and drew him toward her, murmuring a prayer to appeal for celestial protection for him. At that supreme moment, all her solicitude was for him.

Perhaps he understood, in spite of his troubled reason, the misfortune and abandonment that were threatening him, for he repeated, twice, in an emotional voice: “Don’t go, Diana! Don’t go!”

She raised her head painfully and tried to smile in order to reassure him.

“Don’t go, Diana, don’t go,” he went on. “If you go, I’ll have no one to tell them that I’m not the man they’re heaping with scorn. The people will pursue me again, they’ll throw stones at me. The people who recognize me will turn away from my path. ‘Into the Thames! Into the Thames!’”

“My God!” she cried. “My God, won’t you take pity on me? Won’t you return his reason to him before I die?”

In the meantime, the physician was trying to understand the notes that the young woman had written. He could deduce the significance of the occasional word here and there, but the general meaning escaped him. He went out to search for someone who could give him an accurate translation.

When he went back into the main room of the inn, he could not repress a start of joy; two travelers, recently arrived, were standing next to the fireplace. The accent of their pronunciation testified to an English origin. The physician handed them Diana’s note and asked them to translate it. One of the foreigners nonchalantly cast his eyes over the piece of paper, but he had scarcely read the first line than he handed it back to the physician.

“A man obliged to flee his country is no compatriot of mine,” he said, harshly.

“But what does it matter, Monsieur? You can’t refuse to translate that note for me. It’s a matter of an old man who needs care and a young woman who is dying. Not to tell me what this short letter means would make it impossible for me to give them help; it would prevent me from fulfilling the duties of my profession and of humanity. Perhaps it would be killing them!”

Without replying, and as if they had not even heard, the two Englishmen straightened up, moved away from the table and sat down at the table where their dinner had just been served. Full of anger and indignation, the physician returned to the sick woman’s room.

The latter guessed that her note had not been read; a burning tear, the last she was to shed, shone beneath her eyelid. She indicated her uncle to the physician, commended him to his care with a solemn and imploring gesture, and put her thin arms around the old man. The madman let her do it without understanding what was happening. The light of intelligence of which he had given evidence before now seemed totally extinct. He gazed at the physician anxiously and murmured his habitual phrases.

“It wasn’t me! I didn’t do what they they’re accusing me of! Innocent! I’m innocent! Hide me! The people will throw stones at me! ‘Into the Thames! Into the Thames!’”

Suddenly, Diana shivered. She raised her head, and a surge of joy lit up her face. She had just heard a few English words pronounced in the room next to hers. She pointed to the paper and signaled to the physician to go and ask for a translation. He replied by making her understand that he had already tried and had been refused.

The young woman sat up on her bed with a painful effort. Although the doctor tried to dissuade her and hold her back, she put her feet on the floor. She tried to walk—or, rather to drag herself—to the room next door. Several times, her strength betrayed her, but she persisted in her aim nevertheless.

When she went into the room where the foreigners were, one might have thought her a phantom emerging from the tomb; even the Englishmen, in spite of their natural phlegm, their apathetic insouciance and their cruel refusal, could not avoid emotion at the sight of the dying woman, so young and so beautiful. She handed the piece of paper to them and begged them, with a supplicant gesture, to translate its contents for the physician.

One of them took the note and was about to do what she asked when he suddenly saw her totter and fall. The physician ran to catch her. She murmured a few unintelligible words, raised her eyes and extended her hand toward the room where the old man was, and exhaled a long sigh.

“God has taken pity on her suffering,” the physician said, taking the poor child’s pulse. “He has recalled her to him.”

The disorder and trouble caused in the hostelry by the lugubrious event of a death occurring in such dire circumstances is easily imaginable. While the Englishmen and the women hastened to get away from the sad sight, the servants helped the doctor transport the corpse to the old man’s apartment. The latter did not understand the sad reality of the scene that was unfolding before his eyes. On seeing so many people arrive in his presence, he took refuge in a corner, not without murmuring and repeating incessantly: “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! Don’t throw stones at me! I’m innocent. ‘Into the Thames! Into the Thames!’”

 

Habituated as the physician was to the sight of death and the lugubrious scenes accompanying it, he could not repress a sharp emotion on seeing the cadaver of the young woman, whose gaze still seemed to be searching for the old man, to protect him. Piously, he put a veil over her face, still beautiful in spite of death, and went to meet the hotelier to discuss with him what was to be done with the old man who had found himself suddenly abandoned in such a fatal manner.

The hotel proprietor was busy settling the account with the English travelers, who getting ready to leave immediately.

“What, Messieurs!” cried the doctor. “One of your compatriots has just died; an old man of your nation remains without protection; you could provide some information about him, and instead of doing so, you’re in haste to quit Toulouse!”

The two foreigners, like men anticipating annoyance, fuss and perhaps delay, made no response, paid their bill, climbed into their carriage and gave the coachman the order to leave.

“What are you going to do with the old man?” the physician asked the landlord.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll send for the justice of the peace. He’ll draw up the official report. He’ll examine the man’s papers and dispose of him as he thinks it appropriate. Do you think I can turn my hotel into a hospital? It’s bad enough to have a death. Now two travelers have left because they don’t want to stay under the same roof as a corpse. If other clients arrive and find out what lies in that room, they’ll go away and lodge somewhere else. I hope to God that I can get rid of such guests very quickly!”

He did, indeed, go in search of the justice of the peace immediately; the latter did not take long to arrive. At first he wanted to seal the room, but the host judiciously observed that the formality in question would only apply to his own furniture, given that the foreigners had not brought any trunk. The only thing they possessed was the post-chaise in the courtyard that had brought them.

Indeed, no luggage as found in the apartment. A purse containing eight or ten gold coins was all that the foreigners had.

The justice of the peace then beckoned the old man forward. The latter had taken refuge in a corner, according to his insensate habit. It was almost necessary to use violence to bring him before the magistrate.

“What is your name?” the judge asked him, in English, being able to speak that language.

The old man hid his face in his hands and obstinately refused to reply.

“At least you won’t refuse to tell me the name of the young woman who has just died,” said the magistrate, hoping by that stratagem to get some enlightenment from the madman.

The old man shuddered. “Dead! He said dead! Diana’s dead!”

He threw himself toward the bed, lifted up the veil covering the young woman’s face and shivered from head to toe on seeing her motionless and marked with the fatal seal of death. They thought momentarily that the redoubtable spectacle was about to return him to reason, but he only stammered a few inconsequential words; sobs escaped his bosom, and he ended up kneeling beside the bed.

“Well?” said the magistrate. “What is the young woman’s name?”

“Diana! Diana!” murmured the madman.

“Is she your child or a relative?”

“My child, yes, the child of my heart. For me, she has renounced her homeland, her family, her fiancé. She followed me into exile. She’s dead!”

“Why have you left your homeland, then? What reasons forced you into exile?”

That question threw the old man’s ideas, which had seemed to recover some clarity, into confusion again.

“The people!” he said. “The people! Stones, cries, curses! ‘Into the Thames! Into the Thames!’ Oh, how cruel the injustice of her country was to a noble heart! Why am I not dead? There’s no rest, except in the tomb. Fortunate Diana, who can rest!”

“But in France, a foreign country, you have nothing to fear from our compatriots. Tell me your name, as I’m required to record it by the law.”

“The law! The law! Oh, I know that, he law! Judges who interrogate with perfidious skill, who lay traps into which one falls. Black-hearted men who only say ‘you’re innocent’ after telling the entire nation of what you were accused. And then the nation doesn’t want to believe in that innocence! The people are there with shouts and stones…it’s necessary to hide, like a shame, the glory of the name that one made illustrious by so much effort, at the price of such difficult labor. Leave me alone, leave me alone: I have no name; I don’t have one anymore.”

After making further and lengthy attempts, the magistrate had to give up trying to obtain enlightenment from the old man, which his flagrant state of dementia would, in any case, have deprived of any legal value. The justice of the peace drew up the death certificate of a young Englishwoman known only as Diana. As for the old man, he decided that everything belonging to him—which is to say, the post-chaise—should be sold on his behalf, and that he should be placed in a lunatic asylum until someone came to claim him, with further measures to be decided later, if no one presented himself to take charge of him.

The hotel proprietor asked the justice of the peace to take the old man away from his inn immediately.

“The presence of a madman in my establishment,” he contended, “might lead to unfortunate incidents. If he becomes violent, I have no means of restraining him. He might start breaking my furniture and trying to flee.”

The magistrate yielded to this judicious reasoning and ordered the two policemen he had brought with him to take the foreigner to a hospice that he designated to them. The two men immediately went to carry out the order they had received. They found the old man sitting by Diana’s bed, plunged into a profound meditation. They gestured to him to go with them. He smiled, signaled to them to speak more quietly, and pointed at the corpse.

“Shh! She’s asleep, don’t wake her. I’ll go with you as soon as she’s had enough sleep. It would be a cruelty to wake her. She’s had so much fatigue and chagrin to bear!”

The policemen conferred with a glance, slipped behind the foreigner, grabbed him abruptly and started to drag him away. Then he resisted, crying out, and gave evidence of a vigor that one would not have suspected from his paltry appearance. The struggle went on for a long time. Exasperated by several blows they had received, the policemen ended up throwing their adversary on to the bed. There they succeeded in tying him up. Then they loaded him on to their shoulders and carried him away.

During the frightful struggle, Diana’s body had been tipped on to the floor and trampled underfoot. It was thus that it was found by the old woman charged by the justice of the peace with rendering the final duties to the foreigner’s mortal remains. Alone, she wrapped her in a shroud and deposited her in a coffin, after having taken her jewelry and cut off her beautiful blonde hair, in order to sell it.

“The dead,” she said, with a frightful smile, “have no need of hair.”

The following evening, the coffin was taken to the cemetery without any religious ceremony, for they did not know whether the dead woman belonged to the Catholic religion or the Protestant faith. A grave awaited her in a corner reserved for paupers; she was put in it, and then it was filled with earth.

And it was all over.

 

Some time afterwards, a post-chaise arrived in the courtyard of the hotel where Diana had died. Two young men were in the carriage. They had scarcely exchanged a few words with the proprietor when the latter saw them go pale and give the most profound evidence of disturbance and dolor.

“My sister! My poor sister!” cried the younger of the two.

“Diana! My dear unfortunate fiancée!” murmured the other, who was visibly on the brink of fainting.

They immediately ordered that the Diana’s brother be taken to the hospice where his uncle was detained, and his companion to the cemetery where Diana was buried.

At the cemetery, it was necessary for the gravedigger to search for a long time for the place where the requested body lay. So many young women had been buried in the course of a month!

At the hospice, no searching was necessary. A register was opened and the reply was made: “Number 3,623. An old man, assumed to be English, age and domicile unknown. Deceased 28 May 1828.”

Two corpses! Of that beautiful and pure young woman, and that great and illustrious citizen, nothing remained but two cadavers! Alas! What malady, then, had struck the old man?

The attendant consulted his notes and read out: “Furious dementia. From the moment of his incarceration he never ceased to give evidence of extreme agitation. Violent fever. Refusal to take nourishment. Death. At autopsy, inflammation of the meninges of the brain; tubercules on the lungs.”

The young Englishman withdrew in consternation. The attendant called him back.

“Monsieur, will you tell me the name of the deceased. It’s important to record the name in the establishment’s record of deaths.”

“It’s an illustrious name, Monsieur. The unfortunate who died in a lunatic asylum, struggling in the shackles of a straitjacket, was one of the most celebrated citizens of Great Britain. Great Britain has killed him with its ingratitude and its injustice. Record the name of Sir William Congreve.”

“The inventor of the terrible rockets that bear his name?”

“You are only citing one of his entitlements to renown, and not the most glorious, for, if it served to ensure the defense and military might of his country, it can only be regarded, after all, as a means of destruction. Thank God, I can cite with pride other inventions as admirable and more useful. Our whalers owe him a device that removes all the perils from whale-hunting and almost all the fatigue. He has given our powder-factories improvements that tend to the prodigious. He has created a motor in which water combined with air can produce a prodigious force. Thanks to him, the counterfeiting of banknotes has become impossible.

“Finally, he was completing studies that would have given the world an invention designed to allow ships to be maneuvered at sea without sails, without masts and without the resources of steam-power. A deadly and fatal blow, struck by calumny and ingratitude, has interrupted that endeavor abruptly, and permanently, and has annihilated them.

“Wretches accused Sir William Congreve of an odious and implausible fraud. Nevertheless, the superintendent of the Tower of London required the old man who had sat several times as a member of parliament, the great inventor admitted into the bosom of the Royal Society, to sit in the dock of the court of chancellery. That court, after long and dolorous debates, proclaimed my uncle’s innocence, but public faith had been deceived and the opinion of the citizens perverted. At the end of the hearing, a blind and furious populace, determined to see Sir William’s acquittal as an injustice and unworthy partiality for a powerful man, assailed him, insulted him, threw mud and stones at him, pursued him with odious clamors, and wanted to throw him into the Thames. He only escaped by a miracle.

“So much injustice troubled Sir William’s reason; the light of that great genius darkened and vacillated, alas. Imagine my despair. Imagine the dolor that struck our entire family. It was decided, on the advice of several celebrated physicians, that my uncle should leave immediately for the continent. It was hoped that absence, the change of location and the distraction of traveling might lead to a fortunate amelioration of Sir William’s mental condition, and might even bring about a complete cure. Imperious affairs, on which my honor and my fortune depended, retained me in London for some time. Diana, my sister, engaged to a young man she loved, ready to contract a marriage that one the prosecution brought against Sir William had delayed, did not hesitate to devote herself to her uncle, and departed with him.

“We saw them draw away, hearts full of hope, with the certainty that my uncle would soon return to continue his work, and my sister to receive her fiancé’s pledge at the altar. A domestic attached to Sir William’s service accompanied those two dear individuals and assured them—at least, we thought so—of loyal, intelligent and efficacious protection...

“Do you know how that wretch justified our trust? He abandoned Diana, dying, and Sir William, without resources. He robbed them. The lure of two or three hundred pounds sterling led him to commit the most cowardly and odious crime. It was tantamount to murder.

“That last blow finished poor Diana, who was exhausted by fatigue and grief. Vanquished by absence, always in the presence of the sad spectacle of madness, she could not resist, and succumbed. And no one was there to collect her last sigh, no friendly hand to hold her hand at the moment of the supreme adieu. Isolation, abandonment and despair were seated beside her death-bed. But at least it was not in a hospice, it was not bound in the ignoble folds of a straitjacket, it was not confounded with the insane that she rendered her last sigh. She had a coffin. Her remains were not, like my uncle’s, thrown into a common ditch, where it will be impossible to recognize them in order to give them a tomb.”

 

A week later—for the legal formalities could not be completed more rapidly—two coffins, one covered with a black cloth, the other with a white one, and placed in a hearse, left Toulouse in the midst of a crowd that had gathered to see the funeral cortege.

But that curiosity was nothing by comparison with the emotion that excited London in the middle of the month of May. The streets were overflowing with people dressed in mourning; even the poor had found the means of procuring scraps of crepe to put on their hats. Everyone headed urgently toward the shores of the Thames, on the bank of which, at the place most appropriate for a disembarkation, a large and plush catafalque had been established, draped with velvet with lavish silver embroideries.

On the part where the coffin would rest temporarily, a coat of arms surmounted with a baronial crown was visible. Beneath it was a depiction of Britannia, kneeling piously and seemingly shedding tears, while a statue of Gratitude, arms full of palms and civic crowns, advanced to cover the illustrious deceased with them. Members of the regiment of the Coldstream Guards, in ceremonial uniform, with crepes on their drums, surrounded the catafalque and protected it against the unprecedented flood of curiosity-seekers who were trying to get closer to it.

Suddenly, a cannon-shot was head in the distance. The artillery of the port replied with a salvo, and a steam-boat was seen on the waves, whose flag, flying at half-mast, trailed sadly in the Thames as a sign of mourning.

Then there was a tumultuous rumor among the crowd, soon succeeded by a profound and pious silence. Everyone bared their heads, and some knelt down. One poor devil, either by virtue of carelessness or because he had emptied, while awaiting the boat’s arrival, more tankards of beer that was appropriate, kept his hat on; acts of violence were committed against him. The police had a great deal of difficulty preventing him from being thrown into the Thames. They only got him away by pretending to arrest him and promising to take him to prison as a punishment for his culpable irreverence.

In the meantime, the steamer reached the quay and disembarked beneath the catafalque. Immediately, the military band played the most lugubrious tunes, the drums beat a slow measure, and there was a moment when all eyes were filled with tears.

When these honors had been rendered to the mortal remains brought by the steamboat, a numerous deputation of important individuals, mostly bald-headed, advanced to the foot of the catafalque. There, the chairman, in a sonorous voice, pronounced Sir William Congreve’s eulogy. He listed the numerous and illustrious services rendered by the deceased to science and the fatherland. He painted a picture of that celebrated man devoting his life and his fortune to his studies, to giving the means of victory to England. He spoke dolorously about the great invention on which Congreve had been working when death struck him.

“Without his premature death,” he proclaimed, “perhaps England, already so powerful, would be marching even more proudly at the head of the nations of the world. Her redoubtable fleets might be tripled; the tempest would no longer be redoubtable for them; and steam, that great and sublime invention, that motive force that will be the admiration of future centuries, would find itself effaced and vanquished.”

He wiped away a tear, and added: “Although God did not want to permit Congreve to realize his almost-divine idea, and he recalled him before his time, the fatherland knows nevertheless that the great engineer would have overcome all the difficulties of his project; only a few obstacles, of no real importance, still prevented it from being put into execution. Thus, although we do not enjoy the benefit with which he wanted to endow his country, we nevertheless owe an eternal and boundless gratitude to the great man who created it. Let us engrave the name of Congreve on our public monuments, let us teach our children to repeat it with veneration.”

Sobs interrupted the voice of the worthy chairman. Hurrahs replied to him from all directions, attesting to the great sympathy that the orator had encountered in his audience, and to the extent that the sentiments of regret and veneration for Congreve were shared—sentiments that he had just expressed with so much eloquence and sympathy.

Two or three more speeches followed, after which, various deputations placed wreaths on the coffin.

First there were the artillerymen, for whom Congreve had invented the pockets that bore his name and had won them so many victories.

Then came the whalers. For, if the fatigues and perils of their rude profession had diminished, that was because of Congreve, the illustrious Congreve.

Five or six bodies of workmen, who owed to Congreve important ameliorations in the machines and implements of which they made use, followed the whalers, but the individual who made the greatest impression on the witnesses of the scene was a mutilated old soldier whose life Congreve had saved on the battlefield in Spain, and ho had found in the engineer a constant and generous benefactor. He related how Congreve had carried him, dying, how he had fought the enemy for him, and the cares by which he had succeeded in curing him. He added the delicacy with which a generous pension had been paid to him every year, without its provider wishing to be identified.

“But I knew, myself,” he added. “Although my benefactor tried to hide it, I read in his eyes the joy that my happiness caused him, and my heart told me that that happiness was his work. My God, who else would have taken an interest in an old invalid like me?”

Needless to say, that story caused tears to flow from those who heard it, and from all directions blessings were heaped on the name of Congreve, “the friend of the people, the benefactor of the country and the most generous and disinterested of men.”

When the general emotion had clamped down somewhat, a hearse pulled by four richly-harnessed horses advanced to receive the coffin—but the people did not want to allow the horses to do their work. The reins were cut, and everyone began to pull the carriage, which traversed the principal streets of the city of London in that fashion; for, without taking account of the itinerary planned in advance to take the coffin to the house where a mail coach as waiting to transport it to Staffordshire, they proceeded to parade it through every district, in order that all the citizens could pay their regretful respects to the great man whose loss it was necessary to deplore.

While these tumultuous and enthusiastic scenes were unfolding, and Congreve’s remains were subjected to an apotheosis on the part of the people who had driven him mad by dint of ingratitude and injustice, two young men clad in black had a second coffin disembarked in solitude. That coffin, covered in a black cloth, was Diana’s.

The two young men had remained on the ship, sad, silent and almost indignant, during the ovation given to Congreve’s coffin.

“They’re making a god of the man they murdered,” one said to the other.

“This poor victim also owes her death to them,” added the other, on whose face the mortal ravages of malady and despair were visibly legible.

“It’s the story of almost all great men,” put in an old Protestant minister charge with saying the final prayers over the white coffin. “After the hemlock, the apotheosis.”

“But this angel, this young woman they killed in killing her uncle...”

“Her recompense is there,” the old man said, pointing to the sky.

The young man smiled, a celestial hope animating his visage.

“Yes,” he said, “yes. Those whom humans separate down here...”

“God reunites in his bosom for eternity,” added the minister, in a grave voice.

 

 

Translator’s afterword

 

 

In England the name of Sir William Congreve (1772-1828) has been somewhat eclipsed by that of the famous dramatist who shared his name, but not his title. Few people know that it to Congreve the inventor that the “rocket’s red glare” mentioned in the American national anthem, in relation to the siege of Fort Henry, was due to a device of his invention. In fact, his rockets were not every effective as weapons of war, although it could be argued that they were to first step on the long road to Apollo 11. His adaptation of rockets for the propulsion of whalers’ harpoons was also limited in its applicability, although he did indeed help to make the production of gunpowder easier and safer, and his invention of a new kind of paper for banknotes was sufficiently effective as a safeguard against forgery that modern techniques have merely refined it. He obtained numerous other patents, and did, indeed, publish plans for a method of propelling ships without the employment of oars, sails or steam, but he also published plans for a perpetual motion machine, and both devices exhibited more optimism than practicality.

Congreve was the comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich and the M.P. for Plymouth from 1814 until his death, and was also chairman of the Equitable Loam Bank and a director of several companies, one of which was responsible for a share issue that resulted in charges being brought against its directors in the Court of Chancery in 1826. It is conceivable that Congreve was not involved in or aware of the share issue, but he immediately fled to France, where he lived for two years before dying on 16 May 1828 in Toulouse. His young wife and three children went with him. The court took most of that time to reach a decision, but decided shortly before his death that the share issue was clearly fraudulent. Congreve was buried in Toulouse with military honors; he did not die in an asylum, and his body was not returned to England.

Everything in Berthoud’s story is, therefore, a tissue of fantasies built around the name of a real individual and a few of his actual achievements. The endeavor is not, however, entirely out of keeping with the spirit of its era. Berthoud was acquainted with Paul Lacroix, alias Bibliophile Jacob, Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet, the French Romantic Movement’s three leading historians, two of whom also wrote significant works of fanciful fiction, while the third—Michelet—became notorious, occasioning the observation that “no historian ever cared less about accuracy.” Berthoud was also familiar with the best-selling works of the Toulousian Étienne Lamothe-Langon, which mostly consisted of fake memoirs attributed to real historical individuals, which were extremely cavalier in their inventions.