DURING a certain period of my life, I used to cross the Petit Pont (for the Pont Neuf had not yet been built) several times a week at a certain hour with some regularity in the course of my duties. I was then recognized and greeted, for the most part by a number of artisans and other working people, but most notably and most regularly by a very pretty shopkeeper whose establishment was distinguished by a sign depicting two angels, and who curtsied deeply whenever I passed during those five or six months and gazed after me as long as she was able. Her behavior struck me; I returned her gaze and thanked her scrupulously. On one occasion in late winter I rode from Fontainebleau to Paris. When I again came to the Petit Pont, she appeared at the door of her shop and said to me as I rode by: “Your servant, sir!” I returned her greeting, and I saw as I looked around every so often that she had leaned out farther in order to follow me as long as possible. Behind me were my man and a postilion whom I was going to send back to Fontainebleau that evening with letters for certain ladies. My man dismounted on my order and approached the young woman to tell her on my behalf that I had observed her pleasure in seeing me and greeting me and that, if she wished a closer acquaintance, I would call on her at a place of her choosing.
She told him that he could not have brought a more welcome message and that she would go where I wished.
As we rode on, I asked my man if he knew of a place where the woman and I could meet. He replied that he would take her to a certain procuress; but this valet—William of Courtrai, a very solicitous and conscientious man—added immediately that, as the plague had been appearing here and there (and not only among the lower classes and the unwashed—a physician and a canon had also died), he would advise me to have my own mattresses, blankets, and sheets brought along. I accepted his suggestion, and he promised me that he would make up a good bed. Before we stopped I added that he should also bring a proper washbasin, a small bottle of aromatic broth, and some pastries and apples; he was also to make sure the room was well heated, for it was so cold that my feet had frozen stiff in the stirrups and the sky was filled with snow clouds.
When the evening arrived, I went to the appointed place and found a very beautiful woman of about twenty sitting on the bed while the procuress, her head and curved back covered by a black shawl, addressed her urgently. The door was ajar and large fresh logs were burning noisily in the fireplace; my arrival was not observed, and I stood for a moment in the doorway. The young woman was looking calmly into the fire with great eyes. A movement of her head seemed to have taken her miles from the repellent old woman. Some of her heavy dark hair had sprung forward from under her small nightcap and had fallen onto her shift between her shoulder and breast, coiling naturally into a few curls. She was also wearing a short slip of green woolen material and slippers on her feet. At that moment a noise must have given me away; she swiveled her head quickly and turned upon me a face whose overstrained features gave it an expression which was almost feral, but for the radiant self-surrender which beamed out of the wide eyes and shot from the unspeaking mouth like an invisible flame. I was extraordinarily taken with her. In an instant the old woman was gone from the room and I was with my lover. When, in the first astonishment and intoxication of possession, I wished to take certain liberties, she withdrew from me with an indescribable vivid urgency in her eyes and low voice. But the next moment I felt myself enfolded, taken hold of even more tightly by the expression in the bottomless eyes, driving up and up toward me, than by her lips and arms. Then she again seemed to want to say something, but the lips, contorted by kisses, formed no words, and the quivering throat produced nothing more articulate than broken sobs.
Now I had spent much of the day riding on icy country roads and had then endured a violent and highly offensive scene in the King’s antechamber. To blunt my foul mood, I had been both drinking and fighting hard with my double-handed sword, and thus, in the midst of this enticing and mysterious adventure, as I lay with soft arms entwined around my neck and covered with perfumed hair, I was so overcome by a sudden intense weariness and something close to a daze that I could no longer recall how I had arrived in this room. For a moment I even confused the one whose heart beat so close to mine with someone quite different from an earlier time, and thereupon immediately fell fast asleep.
It was still the dead of night when I awoke, but I sensed immediately that my lover was no longer near me. I raised my head and saw by the weak glow of the slumping embers that she was standing at the window. She had opened a shutter and was looking out through the crack. Then she turned, saw that I was awake, and exclaimed (I can still see her bringing the heel of her left hand to her cheek to toss the forward-falling hair back over her shoulder): “It’s still a long, long time until the sun comes up!” I could see now how truly magnificent and beautiful she was and could hardly wait for her to come back to me with a few long noiseless strides of her lovely feet, which the fire had given a reddish glow. But first she went to the hearth, bent down, took the last heavy log in her bare gleaming arms, and threw it quickly into the embers; then turned, firelight and happiness illuminating her face, snatched up an apple from the table as she went by, and was with me, the fresh warmth of the fire still enveloping her limbs but soon to be replaced by a hotter inner blaze. She gripped me with her right hand; in her left was the cool fruit which she had tasted. This she offered me, along with her cheeks, lips, and eyes. The last log in the hearth burned the hottest of all. It inhaled the fire with a shower of sparks, then sent it up again in a furious blaze so that firelight fell over us like a wave breaking on the wall, lifting our entwined shadows abruptly and dropping them again. The great log continued to crackle as its heart fueled new flames whose tongues drove off the weighty dark with bursts and streams of ruddy light. But suddenly the flame dimmed, and a cold gust opened the shutter as quietly as a hand, revealing a pallid and repugnant dawn.
We sat up and knew it was day. But what was outside was not like day, was not like the awakening of the world, did not look like a street. It was impossible to make out details. It was a colorless, unreal jumble in which only amorphous and timeless creatures might be ranging. From somewhere far off, as if out of a memory, a clock struck, and a dank wind that was unlike day or night blew in, gusting more and more strongly until we shivered and clung to each other. She pulled away and looked at me hard; her throat twitched. Something welled up in her and came as far as her lips, but what emerged was not a word, a sob, or a kiss but an inchoate something that resembled all three. It was becoming lighter minute by minute and the subtle look contorting her face more and more expressive. Suddenly shuffling footsteps and voices passed outside, so near the window that she drew back and turned her face to the wall. Two men were going by. For a moment the light from a small lantern carried by one of them entered the room; the other pushed a grinding, creaking wheelbarrow. When they had passed, I stood up, closed the shutter, and lit a lamp. There was still half an apple: we ate it together, and then I asked her if I could not see her again, for I was leaving on a journey on Sunday. But this had been the night between Thursday and Friday.
She answered me that she undoubtedly wished it more fervently than I, but that it would be impossible for her if I did not stay for all of Sunday, as she could see me again only on the night between Sunday and Monday.
I thought at once of various other engagements and raised some difficulties, to which she listened in silence but with a look of exceedingly painful questioning, as at the same time her face became almost eerily hard and dark. Thereupon I of course promised to remain for Sunday, and added that I would thus again be at the same place on Sunday evening. At this she regarded me fixedly and said to me in a raw and broken voice, “I know very well that I have entered a house of shame on your account; but I have done so of my own free will, for I wished to be with you, and would have agreed to any condition. But now I would feel like the worst and basest whore if I returned here. I did it for your sake, because you are to me who you are, because you are Bassompierre, because you are the one man in the world who makes this house honorable through his presence!” “House,” she said; for a moment it was as if a more contemptuous word was on the tip of her tongue; as she spoke the word, she threw such a look toward the four walls, the bed, the blanket that had slid onto the floor, that all the ugly and common things seemed to convulse before the beam of light that shot out of her eyes and shrink back from her in humiliation, as if the wretched room had really become larger for a moment.
Then she added in an indescribably low and solemn tone, “May I die a miserable death if I have ever belonged to anyone other than my husband and you or desired anyone else in the world!” and seemed, as she leaned forward slightly, her life’s breath on her parted lips, to expect some answer, some declaration of faith, yet not to read in my face what she wished, for her eagerly searching gaze was troubled, her eyelashes fluttered, and suddenly she was at the window with her back turned, her forehead pressed against the shutter with all her strength, her whole body so convulsed by soundless but horribly violent weeping that my words died in my mouth and I dared not touch her. At last I took hold of one of her hands, which was hanging as though lifeless, and with the most persuasive words I could muster was finally able to soothe her enough that she again turned her tearful face to me, and suddenly a smile broke like a light from her eyes and around her lips, banishing in an instant all traces of tears and making her entire face shine. And then it was the most entrancing game to see her start to talk to me again with endless variations of “You’ll see me again?” (said ten different ways, now with sweet insistence, now with a childish show of mistrust)—“Then I’ll let you into my aunt’s house!” (first whispered into my ear like a huge secret, then tossed over her shoulder with a shrug and pursed lips as though we were making the world’s most ordinary appointment, and finally repeated coaxingly as she clung to me, laughing into my face). She described the house in every detail, as one tells a child the way to the bakery when he is going there by himself for the first time. Then she straightened, became grave—and the full force of her blazing eyes took hold of me with such strength that it was as if even a lifeless creature could not help but be seized by them—and continued: “I shall wait for you from ten o’clock until midnight and beyond and shall keep waiting, and the door downstairs will be open. First you will find a little passageway; do not stop there, for my aunt’s door is there. Then you will encounter a staircase leading to the upper floor, and there I will be!” Closing her eyes as though dizzy, she threw her head back, spread her arms, and embraced me, and was then gone from my arms once again and encased in her clothes, alien and serious, and no longer in the room; for now it was full daylight.
I made my arrangements, sent some of my servants ahead with my things, and by the next evening was already feeling such a burning impatience that, having instructed my man William not to bring a light, I crossed the Petit Pont soon after the evening bells so that I could at least see my lover in her shop or in the adjoining house and certainly give her some sign of my presence, even if I could not hope to do more than perhaps exchange a few words with her.
I remained by the bridge so as not to be conspicuous and sent my man ahead to reconnoiter. He was gone for some time and, upon his return, had the downcast and pensive look that I always knew that good man to have when he was unable to do my bidding. “The shop is closed,” he said, “and there seems be no one inside. At any rate no one can be seen or heard in the rooms on the lane. The court can be entered only by climbing over a high wall, and a large dog is growling there. One of the front rooms is lit up, though, and you can see into the shop through a crack, but unfortunately it is empty.”
Glumly I determined to turn back, but slowly passed by the house again. In his zeal, my man again put his eyes to the crack, through which came a glimmer of light, and whispered to me that the man was in the room now, not the woman. Curious to see this shopkeeper, whom I could not remember ever having noticed in his shop and whom I pictured alternately as a lump of a fat man or as a frail and emaciated graybeard, I went to the window and was greatly surprised to see an unusually tall and very strongly built man moving about in the well-furnished paneled room. He was certainly a head taller than I and, when he turned toward me, displayed a very handsome and grave face with a brown beard containing a few silver strands, and a brow whose prominence was almost strange, so that the expanse of his temples was greater than I had ever seen on a human face. Although he was quite alone in the room, his expression changed, his lips moved, and, pausing now and again as he moved about, he seemed to be carrying on an imaginary conversation with someone: at one point a gesture of his arm seemed to be brushing off an objection with, as it were, an indulgent authority. There was a great carelessness, an almost contemptuous pride, in all of his movements, and I could not help being prompted by his solitary pacing to recall the vivid image of a very eminent prisoner confined in a tower chamber of the castle at Blois, whom I had been required to guard while in the service of the King. This resemblance seemed to me to become even more complete when the man raised his right hand and looked down carefully, even grimly, at the upraised fingers.
For I had on occasion observed this eminent prisoner, with almost the same gesture, looking at a ring which he wore on the index finger of his right hand and which he was never without. The man in the room then went to the table, moved the lamp globe in front of the candle and put the outstretched fingers of both his hands in the light. He seemed to be examining his nails. Then he blew out the light and left the room, leaving me not without a certain dull angry jealousy, as desire for his wife continued to grow in me and, like a spreading fire, fed on everything that happened to me and was thus confusedly increased by this unexpected apparition, as it was by each of the snowflakes now being blown about by a cold, damp wind and occasionally catching and melting on my eyebrows and cheeks.
I spent the following day in the most frivolous fashion, did not attend properly to any matter, purchased a horse that in fact was not to my liking, was a guest of the Duke de Nemours after dinner, and spent some time at his house in gaming and in the silliest and most abhorrent conversation. There was talk of nothing but the plague spreading in the city with ever greater virulence, and not a word passed the lips of any of these noblemen other than tales of the rapid interment of corpses, of the straw fire which had to be burned in the rooms of the dying to drive off noxious vapors, and so forth; but the most idiotic seemed to me to be the Canon de Chandieu, who, though fat and hale as ever, was unable to refrain from incessantly peering down at his fingernails to see whether they displayed the ominous bluish discoloration by which the disease announced itself.
All of this repelled me. I went home early and retired, but could not sleep; I dressed again impatiently and resolved to go see my lover, whatever the cost; I would force my way in with my servants. I went to the window to wake them, but the frigid night air brought me to my senses, and I saw that this was the surest way to ruin everything. I threw myself onto my bed fully clothed and finally slept.
I spent Sunday in a similar fashion until evening and was in the designated street far too early, but I forced myself to walk up and down in an adjoining lane until the stroke of ten. I then immediately found the house and the door which had been described to me; the door was in fact open, and behind it were the passageway and staircase. Upstairs, however, the second door at the top of the steps was closed, though a narrow strip of light emerged from beneath it. So she was waiting inside, perhaps standing at the door listening, just as I was outside. I scratched on the door with a fingernail and heard footsteps: they sounded to me like the hesitant and uncertain tread of bare feet. I stood for a moment without breathing, then knocked: but the voice I heard was a man’s, asking me who was there. I shrank back into the shadows of the doorway and made not a sound. The door remained closed, and I crept noiselessly down the stairs one step at a time, then out of the passageway into the open, and went up one street and down another with my temples pounding and my jaw set, burning with impatience. I was finally drawn back to the front of the house. I did not yet wish to enter; I felt—I knew—she would send the man away, it had to succeed, I would soon be able to go to her. It was a narrow lane; on the other side were not houses but the wall of a monastery garden. I pressed myself against it and tried to guess the window from my position opposite. Then a light flared in one that was open in the upper story, and subsided. Now I thought I saw it all: she had again thrown a large log into the fireplace, again she was standing in the middle of the room, her limbs gleaming from the fire, or was sitting on the bed, listening and waiting. From the door I would see her and the shadow of her neck, her shoulders, made to rise and fall by the invisible wave. I was already off, already on the stairs; now the door was no longer closed, it was ajar, allowing the flickering light through at the side. As I reached for the handle, I thought I heard the steps and voices of several people. But I did not want to believe it: I took it for the pulse in my temples and my neck and the blazing of the fire in the room. It had blazed loudly then too. As I now took hold of the handle, I grasped fully that there were people there, several of them. But I no longer cared, for I felt—I knew—that she was also there, and that, once I had pushed the door open, I would be able to see her, seize her, pull her to me with one arm, even out of the hands of others, even if I had to use my sword, my dagger, to carve a path for her and myself through a horde of shouting men. The only thing that seemed quite intolerable to me was having to wait any longer.
I pushed the door open, and this is what I saw.
In the middle of the empty room, several people burning bedstraw; visible in the firelight that flooded the room, scraped walls, their debris on the floor; against one wall a table and two naked bodies laid upon it, one very large, with a covered head, the other smaller, stretched out by the wall, the black shadow of its form rising and falling next to it.
I staggered down the stairs and encountered two gravediggers in front of the house. One held his small lantern up to my face and asked what I was looking for. The other pushed his creaking, grinding wheelbarrow against the door of the house. I drew my sword to keep them away from me, and returned home. I immediately drank three or four large glasses of strong wine and, once I had rested, set out the next day upon the journey to Lorraine.
All my efforts to find out anything about the woman following my return were fruitless. I went so far as to visit the shop with the sign of the two angels; even the present proprietors knew nothing of its previous occupants.
M. de Bassompierre, Journal de ma vie, Cologne, 1663
Goethe, Conversations of German Refugees
(1900)