THE RED INN

SOME TIME ago, a Paris banker with extensive commercial relations in Germany was giving a dinner party for a man who till then was unknown to him, an acquaintance of the sort that businessmen acquire here and there through their correspondence. This friend, the head of a rather large firm in Nuremberg, was a good hefty German, a man of taste and erudition, above all a connoisseur of pipes, with a broad handsome Nuremberger face, the wide smooth brow crossed with a few sparse strands of blond hair. He looked the very model of the sons of that pure noble Germania, so fertile in honorable characters, and whose peaceable ways have never failed even after seven invasions. The foreigner laughed readily, listened attentively, and drank remarkably well; to all appearances he enjoyed our champagne wines perhaps as much as he would his own straw-toned Johannisbergers. His name was Hermann, like most Germans whom authors write about. As a man who can do nothing lightly, he sat solid at the banker’s table, eating with that Teutonic appetite famous throughout Europe and bidding a conscientious farewell to the cuisine of our great Carême. To do his guest honor, the master of the house had gathered a few good friends, capitalists and merchants, and a number of pretty and pleasant ladies whose agreeable banter and open manner harmonized with the cordial German spirit. Truly, if you could have experienced, as I had the good fortune to do, this merry gathering of people who had retracted their commercial claws to speculate instead on life’s pleasures, you would have found it difficult to detest usurious loans or deplore bankruptcies. Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.

“Before we part tonight, Monsieur Hermann is going to tell us another one of those chilling German stories.” The announcement came from a pale, blond young woman who had doubtless read the stories of Hoffmann and Walter Scott. She was the banker’s only child, a ravishing creature who was putting the final touches to her education at the Gymnase and adored the plays that theater presented.

The guests were in the contented state of languor and quiet that results from an exquisite meal, when we have demanded a little too much of our digestive capacities. Leaning back in their chairs, wrists and fingers resting lightly upon the table’s edge, a few guests played lazily with the gilded blades of their knives. When a dinner reaches that lull some people will work over a pear seed, others roll a pinch of bread between thumb and index finger, lovers shape clumsy letters out of fruit scraps, the miserly count their fruit pits and line them up on their plates the way a theater director arranges his extras at the rear of the stage. These small gastronomic felicities go unremarked by Brillat-Savarin, an otherwise observant writer. The serving staff had disappeared. The dessert table looked like a squadron after the battle, all dismembered, plundered, wilted. Platters lay scattered over the table despite the hostess’s determined efforts to set them back in order. A few people stared at some prints of Switzerland lined up on the gray walls of the dining room. No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal. We enjoy lingering in a becalmed state, a kind of midpoint between the reverie of a thinker and the contentment of a cud-chewing animal, a state that should be termed the physical melancholy of gastronomy.

Thus the guests turned happily toward the good German, all of them delighted to have a tale to listen to, even a dull one. For during that benign interval, a storyteller’s voice always sounds delicious to our sated senses; it promotes their passive contentment. As an observer of scenes, I sat admiring these faces bright with smiles, lit by the candles and flushed dark by good food; their various expressions produced some piquant effects, seen through the candlesticks and porcelain baskets, the fruits and the crystal.

My imagination was suddenly caught by the appearance of the guest directly across the table from me. He was a man of average height, somewhat plump, cheerful, with the style and bearing of a stockbroker, and apparently endowed with only a very ordinary turn of mind. I had not noticed him before, but just then his face, probably shadowed by a flicker of the light, seemed to me to change character: It had gone dull, earthen, furrowed with purplish folds. You might have described it as the cadaverous head of a dying man. He was immobile like a figure painted into a diorama; his vacant eyes stayed fixed on the glittering facets of a crystal stopper on a bottle, but he was certainly not counting them and seemed lost in some strange contemplation of the future or the past. I studied that puzzling face at some length, and it made me wonder: “Is he ill? Has he drunk too much? Has the market collapsed? Is he considering how to swindle his creditors?”

“Look across there!” I murmured to the woman on my left, indicating the face of the unknown fellow. “Wouldn’t you say that’s the look of a bankruptcy about to happen?”

“Oh,” she answered, “he’d be looking jollier if that were the case.” With a graceful tilt of the head, she added: “If that man should ever lose his fortune, it would be world news. He has millions in real estate. He used to be a provisioner for the imperial armies—a good fellow and rather unusual. He married his second wife as a financial move, but he does make her extremely happy. He has a pretty daughter, whom he refused to acknowledge for a very long time, but his son died—unfortunately killed in a duel—and that forced him to take the girl back into the household as they could no longer have children. The poor girl has suddenly become one of the richest heiresses in Paris. The loss of his only son has plunged this dear man into a grief that surfaces from time to time.”

At that moment, the provisioner lifted his eyes to mine; his gaze made me shiver, it was so somber and pensive! That glance must sum up a whole lifetime. But suddenly his face turned merry: He took up the crystal stopper, set it crisply onto a carafe full of water that stood before his plate, and turned his head toward Monsieur Hermann with a smile. The man was beatific with gastronomic pleasure; he probably hadn’t a thought in his head, wasn’t pondering a thing. I immediately felt rather ashamed of squandering my powers of divination in anima vili—on a mere thickheaded financier. While I was engaged in pointless phrenological observation, the good German had filled his nose with a dose of snuff and started on his story. It would be difficult to reproduce the tale in the same terms, what with the man’s frequent interpolations and verbose digressions, so I have written it again here in my own way, leaving out the Nuremberger’s mistakes and using any poetic and interesting elements it might contain, with the boldness of those writers who somehow neglect to state on the title page of their publications: “Translated from the German.”

Late in the month of Vendémiaire in year VII of the republican era—or according to the style of our day, October 20, 1799—two young men left the city of Bonn in the morning and by day’s end had reached the outskirts of Andernach, a small town on the left bank of the Rhine a few leagues from Koblenz.

At the time, the French army under General Augereau was holding maneuvers before the Austrian forces then occupying the right bank of the river. The republican division headquarters was Koblenz, and one of the demi-brigades from Augereau’s corps was stationed at Andernach. The two young travelers were French. By their uniforms (blue mixed with white and faced in red velvet), by their sabers, and especially by the hats covered in green oilcloth and ornamented with a tricolor plume, even the German peasants could recognize that these were military surgeons, men of science and skill who were generally well liked, not only by the army but also by the people whose lands the French troops had invaded. At that time, many youngsters of good family who were snatched from their medical training by General Jourdan’s recent conscription law quite naturally chose to continue their studies on the battlefield rather than be assigned to action as a soldier, a role so little suited to their previous training and their peaceable purpose. Men of science, pacific and useful, such young men did some good amid so much misery, and they got on well with the educated people in the various countries through which the cruel civilization of the Republic drove its way. Each carrying a travel warrant and credentials as assistant surgeon signed by Coste and Bernadotte, the two were reporting to their assigned demi-brigade. Both came of bourgeois families in Beauvais who were only moderately wealthy but in which the genteel manners and loyalties of the provinces were transmitted as part of their legacy. Drawn by a curiosity quite natural in the young to see the theater of war before they were actually obliged to begin their duties, they had traveled by coach as far as Strasbourg. Maternal prudence had provided them each with only a meager sum of money, but they felt rich with their few louis in hand, a veritable treasure in a period when the revolutionary banknotes had dropped to their lowest value and gold was worth a great deal.

The two assistant surgeons, twenty years old at most, succumbed to the poetry of their situation with all the enthusiasm of youth. From Strasbourg to Bonn, they had toured the lands of the Electorate and the banks of the Rhine as artists, as philosophers, as observers. People of a scientific bent are at that age truly multifaceted beings. Even when making love, or traveling, a medical intern should be collecting the rudiments of his fortune or of his future renown. So the two youths surrendered to that profound admiration that seizes an educated person at the spectacle of the banks of the Rhine and the Swabian countryside between Mayence and Cologne: powerful, rich, hugely various nature full of feudal traces, lush green but everywhere stamped with the scars of steel and fire. Louis XIV and Marshal Turenne have cauterized that gorgeous land. Here and there ruins attest to the pride, or perhaps the foresight, of the Versailles king, who ordered the destruction of the fine châteaus that once graced this part of Germany. Seeing this marvelous forested terrain abounding in the picturesque quality of the Middle Ages, however ruined, you sense the German spirit, its reveries and its mysticism.

The two friends’ stay at Bonn had served the goals of both science and pleasure. The main hospital of the Gallo-Batavian Army and of Augereau’s division was installed in the actual palace of the elector. The newly qualified surgeons thus went there to see old schoolmates, present their letters of recommendation, and become acquainted with some basic aspects of their profession. But also, there as elsewhere, they were stripped of some of the narrow prejudices we all retain for so long about the superiority of the monuments and beauties of our own homeland. Surprised by the spectacle of the marble columns decorating the electoral palace, they went on to admire the grandeur of German buildings, and at every turn found still more antique or modern treasures. Time and again, the roads the two friends wandered on their way to Andernach would take them onto the peak of some granite mountain higher than the rest. From there, through a gap in the forest, through some crevice in the rock, they would glimpse the Rhine framed in the sandstone or festooned with vigorous plant life. The valleys, the trails, the trees released an autumnal fragrance that transports one toward reverie; the treetops were starting to turn golden, to take on warm, brown tones that signal aging; the leaves were dropping but the sky was still a deep azure, and the dry roads traced yellow lines through the landscape lit now by the slanted beams of the setting sun. Half a league before Andernach, the two friends walked their horses through a deep silence, as if the war were not devastating this lovely land, and they followed a trail cut for goats across the high bluish granite walls with the Rhine roiling past below. Soon they descended a slope of the gorge at whose base lay the little town set charmingly at the river’s edge, offering sailors a pretty port.

“Germany is truly a beautiful country!” exclaimed one of the two youths, the one called Prosper Magnan, as he caught sight of Andernach’s colorful houses, nestled like eggs in a basket and separated by trees, gardens, and flowers. Then he stood for a moment admiring the pointed roofs with their projecting gables, the wooden staircases and galleries of a thousand tranquil houses, and the boats rocking to the waves in the harbor.

When Monsieur Hermann pronounced the name Prosper Magnan, the provisioner seized the carafe, dashed water into his glass, and swallowed it in a single gulp. The movement having drawn my attention, I thought I noticed a slight trembling in the capitalist’s hands and a dampness on his brow.

“No, no,” he replied, thanking me with a polite wave. “I am listening,” he added, and nodded toward the other guests, who had all turned at once to look at him.

Monsieur Hermann went on: “I’ve forgotten the name of the second young man, but from Prosper Magnan’s account, I learned that his companion was dark-haired, rather thin, and good-humored. If I may, I’ll call him Wilhelm, to make the storytelling easier to follow.”

And so the good German took up the tale again, having—with no concern for the romantic or for local color—baptized the young French doctor with a Germanic name.

When the two young men arrived at Andernach, night had fallen. Assuming that they would lose a good deal of time seeking out their commanders, establishing their credentials, and arranging for military billets in a city already full of soldiers, they resolved to spend their last night of freedom at an inn situated a short distance outside Andernach, and which from the rocky cliffs above they had admired for its rich coloring, lovelier still in the flames of the setting sun. Painted entirely in red, the building stood out sharply from the rest of the landscape, separated as it was from the general mass of the town itself and setting its broad crimson swath against the greens of the varied foliage, its vivid walls against the grayish tones of the water. The place owed its name to its exterior paintwork, which had probably been laid on eons ago at the whim of its original owner. A marketing superstition quite natural to the successive owners of the inn, renowned as it was among Rhine boatmen, had assiduously preserved the traditional decor. Hearing horses approach, the proprietor of the Red Inn came to the doorway.

“Good lord,” he exclaimed. “Gentlemen, a moment later and you would have had to bed down outdoors under the stars, like most of your countrymen bivouacking at the other end of Andernach. My place is full. If you must have a real bed, all I can offer you is my own room. As for your horses, I’ll have hay put down for them in a corner of the courtyard. Today my stable is full of Christians . . . The gentlemen are arriving from France?” he went on after a slight pause.

“From Bonn,” replied Prosper. “And we’ve had nothing to eat since morning.”

“Oh well, as for food,” said the innkeeper nodding his head, “people come from ten leagues around to feast at the Red Inn! You’ll have a banquet fit for a prince—fish from the Rhine! That says it all.”

Handing over their exhausted mounts to the host, who called rather uselessly for his grooms, the two young surgeons stepped into the inn’s common room. At first a thick whitish cloud exhaled by a crowd of smokers prevented them from seeing much of the people they would be joining, but once they were seated at a table, with the practical patience of philosophical travelers who have come to understand complaints are useless, they made out through the tobacco fumes the obligatory furnishings of a German inn: potbelly stove, clock, tables, beer mugs, long pipes; here and there a face stood out, Jewish, German, the rough mugs of a few river men. The epaulettes of several French officers glittered within the fog, and spurs and sabers clattered constantly against the stone floor. Some men were playing cards, others bickering or silent, eating, drinking, walking about. A short heavy woman wearing a black velvet bonnet, a blue-and-silver stomacher, a pincushion, a bundle of keys, a silver clasp, with her hair in braids—the distinctive markers of all mistresses of German inns, an outfit so regularly pictured in a thousand popular prints that it is too commonplace to bother describing—well then, the innkeeper’s wife did a skillful job of keeping the two youths alternately waiting and grumbling. Gradually the din lessened, the travelers retired, and the cloud of smoke cleared. By the time the doctors’ plates arrived and the classic Rhine carp appeared on the table, it was eleven o’clock and the room was empty. Through the nighttime silence they could hear the horses chomping their fodder and stamping a hoof, the murmur of the Rhine, and those indefinable sounds of a full house when everyone is bedding down. Doors and windows open and close, voices mumble half-heard words, and a few queries echo from the bedchambers. In that moment of quiet bustle, the two Frenchmen and their host—who was busily extolling Andernach, the food, the Rhine wine, the French Republican army, his wife—all pricked up their ears at the hoarse cries of a few sailors and the scrape of a boat against the wharf. The innkeeper, doubtless familiar with the guttural talk of boatmen, abruptly left the room and soon returned. He brought with him a short stout man trailed by two sailors carrying a heavy valise and a few bundles. The sailors set down the packs, and the man picked up his valise himself and kept it close as he unceremoniously sat down at the table facing the two young doctors.

“Go sleep on your boat,” he told the sailors, “as the inn is full. All things considered, that will be better.”

“Monsieur,” said the innkeeper to the new arrival, “this is all the food I have left.” And he pointed to the supper he had served to the two Frenchmen. “I haven’t one bread crust more, not a bone.”

“Not even enough to fill my wife’s thimble! And as I had the honor of telling you, there’s not a bed to be had but the chair you’re sitting in, and no room but this one.”

At these words, the short man cast upon the innkeeper, the room, and the two Frenchmen a gaze expressing equal measures of fear and caution.

Here Monsieur Hermann interrupted his tale. “At this point I must note,” he said, “that we never learned either the actual name nor the story of this stranger. His papers showed that he had come from Aix-la-Chapelle; he went by the name Walhenfer, and he owned a rather sizable pin factory outside Neuwied. Like all the manufacturers in that area, he was wearing a plain fabric redingote, trousers, and a waistcoat of deep green velours, boots, and a wide leather belt. His face was quite round, his manner open and cordial, but throughout the evening he had difficulty fully masking some secret worries, or perhaps some racking trouble. The innkeeper has always thought that the German businessman was fleeing his country. I later learned that his factory had been burned down by one of those random events unfortunately so frequent in wartime. Despite his generally anxious look, his face showed a very comradely disposition. He had handsome features, in particular a thick neck whose whiteness was so nicely set off by a black cravat that Wilhelm jokingly remarked on it to Prosper . . .”

Prosper politely offered to share their supper, and Walhenfer accepted easily, like a man sure he could return the courtesy. He laid his valise flat on the floor, set his feet upon it, took off his hat, pulled up to the table, and removed his gloves and two pistols that were tucked into his belt. The host quickly laid him a place and the three clients silently set about satisfying their appetites. The atmosphere in the room was so warm and the flies so numerous that Prosper asked the innkeeper to open the casement window onto the entryway to freshen the air. The window was barricaded by an iron bar whose two ends fit into holes carved into the two sides of the recess. For still greater security, a heavy screw fastened into a bolt on each shutter. Prosper idly watched the way the host went about opening the window.

Since I mention these details, I should describe the inn’s interior arrangements; the interest of the story does depend on an exact understanding of its layout. The room where the three clients sat had two exit doors. One opened onto the Andernach road running along the Rhine; across the way in front of the inn, naturally, was a small wharf where the businessman’s hired boat was tied up. The other door opened onto the courtyard of the inn. This courtyard was enclosed by very high walls and was filled, for the moment, with cattle and horses, the stables being full of people. The main gate out of the courtyard had just been so elaborately barred for the night that, to be quicker, the innkeeper had brought the businessman and the sailors indoors through the common-room door from the river road. After opening the window as Prosper Magnan had requested, the innkeeper went back to lock the door, slipping its crossbars into their recesses and turning the bolts. The host’s own bedroom, where the two young surgeons were to sleep, adjoined the common room and was separated by a thin wall from the kitchen, where the innkeeper and his wife would presumably be spending the night. The serving girl had just left for a bunk, the corner of the hayloft, or some other place. It was plain that the common room, the innkeeper’s bedroom, and the kitchen were somewhat isolated from the rest of the inn. In the courtyard were two large dogs, whose deep barking made clear they were vigilant and very irritable guardians.

“What silence, and what a beautiful night!” Wilhelm exclaimed, looking out at the sky while the host locked the door. The slap of the waves was now the only sound to be heard.

“Gentlemen,” said the businessman to the two Frenchmen, “allow me to offer you a few bottles of wine to wash down your carp. We will relieve some of the day’s fatigue by drinking. From your faces and the state of your clothing, I can see that, like me, you have traveled a long way today.”

The two friends accepted, and the innkeeper left through the kitchen door to go down to the cellar. When the five fine old bottles he brought up were on the table, his wife served the rest of the meal. With her proprietor’s eye she surveyed the room and the dishes; then, confident that she had seen to all the travelers’ needs, she returned to the kitchen. The four companions—for the host had been invited to drink with the others—did not hear her retire, but later, during the quiet intervals in their conversation, some very loud snores, made more resonant by the hollow planks of the shed where she had settled, brought a smile to the faces of the friends, and especially to the host’s.

Toward midnight, with nothing left on the table but biscuits, cheese, dried fruits, and good wine, the companions—mainly the two young Frenchmen—grew talkative. They spoke of their home country, of their studies, of the war. With time, the conversation grew livelier. Prosper Magnan brought a few tears to the eyes of the fleeing businessman when, with the openness of a boy from Picardy and the naïve manner of a good, tender nature, he pictured what his mother might be doing at that very moment as he sat here on the banks of the Rhine.

“I can just see her, reading her evening prayer before bed! She certainly hasn’t forgotten me, and she must be wondering ‘Where is he now, my poor Prosper?’ But if she’s won a few francs at cards from a neighbor—maybe from your mother,” he added, nudging Wilhelm’s elbow, “she’ll go put them away in the big clay pot where she’s collecting the money she needs to buy the thirty acres next to the little plot she owns in Lescheville. Those thirty acres will easily cost about sixty thousand francs. Really good meadowland . . . Ah, if I can ever put that amount together, I would live my whole life in Lescheville and never want another thing! How often my father would talk about wanting those thirty acres and the pretty brook that winds through the fields! Well, in the end he died without ever managing to buy them. I used to play there so often!”

“Monsieur Walhenfer, haven’t you got some secret wish of your own?” asked Wilhelm.

“Yes, young man, yes indeed! But it actually did come true, and now . . .” The good fellow fell silent without finishing his sentence.

“Me,” said the innkeeper, his face slightly flushed, “last year I bought a field I’d been wanting to own for more than ten years.”

They went on chatting that way, as men do when tongues are loosened by wine, and they conceived that passing affection for one another that we indulge more generously when we travel—so that, as they stood up to prepare for sleep, Wilhelm offered the businessman his bed.

“You can accept it the more easily,” he told Walhenfer, “since I can bed down with Prosper. It certainly won’t be the first time nor the last. You are our elder, and we must honor age!”

“Ah, no!” the innkeeper said. “My wife’s bed in that room has several mattresses, you can put one of them on the floor.” And he went to close the casement window, causing the noise the cautious operation entailed.

“I accept,” said the businessman. Then, lowering his voice and looking at the two comrades, he added, “I confess I was hoping for this. My boatmen seem a little suspect . . . For tonight, I am not unhappy to be in the company of two decent, kind young men—two French soldiers! I have a hundred thousand francs’ worth of gold and diamonds in my valise!”

The affectionate reserve with which the two young men received this reckless revelation reassured the German fellow. The innkeeper helped his visitors to take apart one of the beds. Then, when all was arranged for the best, he wished them good night and went off to sleep. The businessman and the two doctors joked about the difference in their headrests: Prosper put his instrument bag and Wilhelm’s under his mattress to replace the missing pillow, while Walhenfer took special care to set his valise beneath the head of his bed.

“We’ll both of us be sleeping on top of our fortunes—you on your gold and I on my medical bag. It remains to be seen whether my instruments will ever make me as much gold as you’ve already acquired.”

“You certainly have every reason to hope so,” said the businessman. “Hard work and honesty do win out, but it takes patience.”

Walhenfer and Wilhelm soon fell asleep. Perhaps because his bed on the floor was too hard, perhaps because his extreme fatigue caused him insomnia, perhaps through some fateful state of mind, Prosper Magnan lay awake. His thoughts gradually took a bad turn. He could think of nothing else but the hundred thousand francs the businessman was sleeping on. For him, a hundred thousand francs was an enormous ready-made fortune. He began by putting it to a thousand different uses, building castles in Spain, as we all do so happily in those moments before sleep when images come alive confusedly in our minds, and when often, in the quiet of the night, ideas take on a magical force. He fulfilled his mother’s wishes: He bought the thirty acres of meadowland; he married a girl from Beauvais whom he could never hope to court with the present disparity in their circumstances. With the money he bought himself a whole lifetime of delights, and he saw himself happy—a father, a rich man, a figure of consequence in his province, perhaps even mayor of Beauvais. His Picard imagination caught fire as he sought a way to turn these fictions into reality; he put enormous energy into working out a hypothetical crime. Dreaming the businessman’s death, he distinctly saw visions of gold and diamonds. His eyes were dazzled. His heart pounded. This deliberation itself was certainly already a crime. Entranced by piles of gold, he grew drunk with murderous imaginings. He questioned whether that poor German fellow really needed to go on living, and posited that the man had never existed at all—in short, he conceived the crime in a way that gave it impunity. The other shore of the Rhine was occupied by the Austrians; beneath the window were a boat and boatmen; he could cut the sleeping man’s throat, toss him into the Rhine, slip out through the casement window with the valise, give the sailors some gold, and cross over to Austria. He went so far as to calculate whether by now he had accrued enough skill with his surgical instruments to slice off his victim’s head before the fellow could utter a single cry . . .

Prosper rose from his mattress slowly and silently. Certain he had wakened no one, he dressed, walked into the common room; then, with that special intelligence a man can suddenly find in himself, with that power of skill and determination that never fails either prisoners or criminals in accomplishing their aims, he unscrewed the iron bars, slipped them from their holes without the faintest sound, set them against the wall, and opened the shutters, pressing on the hinges to muffle any creaking. The moon cast its pale brightness onto the scene and allowed him a faint view of the objects in the room where Wilhelm and Walhenfer lay sleeping. For a moment he paused, he told me. His heartbeat was so strong, so deep, so resonant that it frightened him. He feared he would not manage to act coolly; his hands were trembling and the soles of his feet felt as if they were pressing down on fiery coals. But the execution of his plan was accompanied by such elation that he saw a kind of predestination in Fate’s approval. He opened the window, returned to the bedroom, picked up his instrument bag, and looked in it for the tool best suited to carry out his crime.

“When I came to the man’s bed,” he told me, “I automatically prayed for God’s blessing.” Just as he raised his arm and gathered all his strength, he heard a kind of voice within him and seemed to glimpse a light. He flung the instrument down onto his mattress, rushed into the common room, and went to the window. Standing there, he was struck with a profound horror at himself; and sensing nonetheless that his virtue was frail, still fearing he could succumb to the trance gripping him, he leapt quickly out onto the road and strode along the Rhine, pacing back and forth before the inn like a sentinel. Several times he got as far as Andernach in his headlong walk; and several times his steps took him all the way to the slope that led to the inn. But the silence of the night was so profound, and he had such trust in the guard dogs, that at times he failed to keep watch on the window he had left open. He wanted to exhaust himself and bring on sleep. However, as he paced beneath a cloudless sky, as he gazed in wonder at the lovely stars, also perhaps affected by the pure night air and the melancholy rustle of the waves, he fell into a reverie that gradually brought him back to a wholesome moral state. Eventually reason completely swept away his momentary madness. The teachings from his upbringing, religious principles, and above all, he told me, images from the modest life he had led till then beneath the parental roof all prevailed over his troubled thoughts. After a long meditation, whose spell overtook him on the riverbank as he leaned on a broad stone, he came back and felt, he said later, so far from seeking sleep that he could stand guard over millions in gold. As his righteous character rose up again proud and strong from that struggle, he dropped to his knees in a rush of ecstasy and bliss—he thanked God, he felt happy, light, content, as he had on the day of his First Communion, when he believed himself worthy of the angels because he had spent the whole day without sinning in word, action, or thought.

He slipped back into the inn, locked the window without concern for any noise, and dropped instantly into bed. His moral and physical weariness delivered him unresisting to sleep. Moments after laying his head on the mattress, he fell into that strange, primal somnolence that often precedes deep sleep. The senses grow heavy and life is gradually abolished; thoughts go unfinished, and the last few starts of our senses simulate a kind of dream state. The air is so very heavy in here, Prosper thought, I feel as if I’m breathing damp steam. Vaguely he told himself that the atmospheric effect must be due to the contrast between the room’s muggy temperature and the fresh outdoor air. He became aware of a rhythmic sound, rather like water dripping from a spout. In a moment of panicky terror, he thought to rise and call to the innkeeper, wake the businessman or Wilhelm; but then to his misfortune, he remembered the big wooden clock and deciding that what he heard was the swing of the pendulum he fell asleep with that hazy, muddled idea.

“Would you like water, Monsieur Taillefer?” asked the host, seeing the provisioner reach mechanically for the carafe.

Monsieur Hermann went on with his tale after the short pause occasioned by the banker’s query.

The next morning Prosper Magnan was awakened by a great uproar. He thought he heard piercing cries, and he felt that violent wrench of nerves we experience when, as we wake, a painful sensation begun during our sleep persists. A physiological event occurs in us, a jolt (to use a workman’s term) that has never been sufficiently examined, even though it involves phenomena of some scientific interest. That awful anguish, possibly the effect of a too-abrupt rejoining of our two natures that are nearly always separated during sleep, is usually quick to pass, but now in the poor young doctor it persisted, even suddenly increased, and rose to a dreadful horripilation when he saw a pool of blood between his mattress and Walhenfer’s bed. The poor German’s head lay on the floor, his body sprawled on the bed. All the blood had poured out from the neck. Seeing the eyes still open wide and staring, seeing the blood that stained his own sheets and even his hands, recognizing his surgical instrument on the bed, Prosper Magnan fainted, and collapsed into Walhenfer’s blood.

When he regained consciousness, he found himself in the common room. He was seated on a chair, surrounded by French soldiers before a watchful, curious throng. He stared in a stupor at a French Republican officer who was taking testimony from several witnesses and must have been compiling a report. He recognized the innkeeper and his wife, the two sailors, and the serving girl from the inn. The surgical instrument the murderer had used . . .

Here Monsieur Taillefer coughed, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his nose, and mopped his brow. These rather ordinary actions were noticed by no one but myself; all the other guests were gazing at Monsieur Hermann and listening to him with a kind of avidity. The provisioner leaned his elbow on the table, put his head in his right hand, and stared fixedly at Monsieur Hermann. From then on he never betrayed a single sign of emotion or interest, but his face remained pensive and ashen, as it had been earlier when he was playing with the crystal stopper.

The surgical instrument the murderer had used lay on the table with Prosper’s bag, wallet, and papers. The spectators gazed in turn at the material evidence and at the young man, who looked near to dying and whose dulled eyes seemed to see nothing. A hubbub from outdoors indicated the presence of the crowd drawn to the inn by news of the crime and perhaps also by the hope to glimpse the murderer. The pacing of the sentinels stationed beneath the windows of the room, the sound of their rifles, rose over the crowd’s chatter; but the inn was closed, the courtyard empty and silent. Unable to bear the gaze of the examining officer, Prosper Magnan felt his hand being clasped by someone, and he raised his eyes to see who could be his protector among this enemy mob. From the uniform he recognized the surgeon general of the demi-brigade stationed at Andernach. The man’s look was so piercing, so severe, that the poor young doctor shuddered from it, and let his head fall onto the back of his chair. A soldier put vinegar beneath his nostrils, and he quickly revived. Still, though, his haggard eyes seemed so empty of life and awareness that after taking his pulse the surgeon general told the examining officer, “Captain, it’s impossible to question this man right now.”

“Well, all right. Take him away,” the captain responded, interrupting the surgeon to address a corporal standing behind the young doctor.

“Damned coward,” the soldier muttered to Prosper. “At least try to walk strong in front of these German dogs and uphold the honor of the Republic.” The words stirred Prosper Magnan—he stood up straight and took a few steps. But when the door opened and he felt the rush of the outside air, saw the crowds hurry forward, his strength failed him and he tottered, his knees buckling.

“This rotten little sawbones, he ought to die twice over! Step it up! March, you!” growled the two soldiers supporting him.

“Oh, the coward! The coward! That’s him! There he is, look, here he comes!” The words seemed to chorus from a single voice, the clamoring voice of the mob running along beside him hurling insults, its numbers growing at every step. On the way from the inn to the prison, the uproar from the townsfolk and the soldiers as they walked, the jumble of a hundred different conversations, the sight of the sky and the coolness of the air, the scene of Andernach and the quivering of the Rhine waters—all these impressions at once assailed the doctor’s soul, indistinct and tangled, dulled like all his sensations since he woke. There were times on that walk, he told me, when he felt he had ceased to exist.

I was in prison myself at the time. (M. Hermann said, interrupting his tale.) Ardent as we all are at twenty, I was determined to defend my country, and I commanded a band of freelance resistance troops I had mustered in the Andernach region. A few nights earlier, I had run into a detachment of French troops, eight hundred men. We were two hundred at the very most. My spies had sold me out. I was thrown into the Andernach prison. It was expected I would be shot as an example to intimidate the locals. The French were talking about reprisals as well, but the murder they planned to avenge through executing me had been committed somewhere else, not here within the Electorate. My father had obtained a three-day stay of execution to go and ask for a pardon from General Augereau, who granted it. So I saw Prosper Magnan as he was brought into the prison at Andernach, and I was struck by a profound pity. Pale as he was, disheveled, all bloody, still his face had a quality of candor, of innocence, that affected me powerfully. To my eyes, he looked like Germany itself, with his long blond hair, his blue eyes. A veritable picture of my poor faltering country, he seemed to me a victim, not a murderer. As he passed my window, he threw out—I don’t know to where—the bitter, mournful smile of a madman recovering a fleeting glimmer of sanity. That smile was absolutely not the smile of a murderer. When I saw the jailer, I asked about his new prisoner. “He hasn’t said a word since we put him into his cell. He sat down, he set his head in his hands, and now he’s sleeping, or thinking about his troubles. From what the Frenchmen say he’ll be tried tomorrow morning, and he’ll be shot within twenty-four hours.”

That evening, during the brief moment I was permitted to walk in the prison yard, I loitered under the young man’s window. We spoke a little and he gave me a straightforward account of his awful adventure, answering quite precisely my various questions. After that first conversation, I never doubted his innocence. I asked and was granted permission to spend a few hours with him. So I saw him several times, and the poor child acquainted me openly with all he was thinking. He felt both guilty and innocent at once. Recalling the frightful temptation he had found the strength to resist, he feared he had committed—during his sleep, in a somnambulant trance—the crime he had dreamed while awake.

“Oh,” he exclaimed excitedly, “Wilhelm could never . . .” He didn’t even finish the sentence. Hearing that warmhearted cry, full of youth and decency, I pressed his hand. “When Wilhelm woke up,” he went on, “he must have been terrified, he must have panicked and run off.”

“Without waking you?” I said. “But then your defense should be an easy matter, for Walhenfer’s valise will not have been stolen.”

Suddenly he burst into tears. “Oh yes! I am innocent!” he cried. “I never killed anyone . . . I remember what I dreamed that night—I was playing prisoner’s base with my old schoolmates. I couldn’t have cut off a man’s head while I was dreaming about running!”

Despite the flashes of hope that occasionally afforded him a little peace, he still felt crushed by remorse. He had in fact raised his arm to slice off the man’s head; he judged himself and could not see his heart as pure when in his mind he had committed the crime. “And yet, I am good!” he would cry. “Oh, my poor mother! At this very moment she could be happily playing a game of imperial with her neighbors in her little sewing parlor. If she knew I had even lifted my hand to murder someone—ah, she would die! And I am in prison, accused of committing a crime! I may not have killed that man, but I will certainly kill my mother!”

Now he was no longer weeping, but, stung by that sudden swift fury common among Picards, he flung himself against the wall, and if I had not held him back he would have cracked his skull.

“Wait for your trial,” I told him. “You’ll be acquitted; you’re innocent! And your mother—”

“My mother,” he cried wildly. “The first thing she will hear is the accusation! In those small towns that’s how it is, the poor woman will die of pain from it. Besides, I am not innocent. Do you want to know the whole truth? I feel I have lost the virginity of my conscience.”

After that terrible sentence he sat down, crossed his arms on his chest, bent his head, and gazed darkly at the floor. Just then the guard appeared and asked me to return to my own cell. Reluctant to abandon my companion at a moment of such profound disheartenment, I clasped him to me in friendship.

“Be patient,” I told him. “It may turn out well. If a decent man’s voice has any chance of stilling your doubts, know that I respect you and love you. Accept my friendship, and rest on my heart if you are not at peace with your own.”

The next morning toward nine o’clock, a corporal and four riflemen came to take the young doctor away. Hearing the soldiers approach, I went to my window. As the young man crossed through the courtyard, he turned his eyes up at me. I will never forget that gaze full of thoughts, apprehensions, resignation, and a kind of sorrowful, melancholy grace. It was like a silent, intelligible final testament of a man bequeathing his lost life to a friend. The night must have been very hard, very lonely for him, but perhaps the pallor on his face testified to a stoicism drawn from a new sense of self-esteem. Perhaps he was cleansed by remorse, and felt he was washing his sin away with pain and shame. He walked with a firm step now, and had removed the bloodstains he had unwittingly acquired. “My hands must have trailed in the blood as I slept, for my nights are always very agitated,” he had said the evening before, in a horrible tone of despair.

I learned he would appear before a court-martial. The division was to move out in another day, and the commander was unwilling to leave Andernach without having tried the crime where it was committed.

I paced my cell in terrific anxiety while the court-martial sat. Finally, toward noon, Prosper Magnan was brought back to the prison. I was having my usual walk outside just then; he saw me and rushed over to throw himself into my arms.

“Lost!” he said. “I am lost, no hope at all! For everyone here, I shall always be a murderer.” He lifted his head proudly. “This injustice has completely restored my innocence. My life would have been always troubled; my death will be blameless. But is there a future?”

The whole eighteenth century was contained in that abrupt query. He turned pensive.

“Well,” I said, “how did you answer? What did they ask you? Did you not tell the story, straight out, as you told it to me?”

He stared at me for a moment; then, after another frightening pause, he responded in a feverish rush of words. “First, they asked, ‘Did you leave the inn during the night?’ I said yes. ‘By what exit?’ I flushed and answered, ‘By the window.’

“‘So you had opened it?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You must have been very careful about it; the innkeeper heard nothing.’ I was stupefied . . . The sailors had reported they saw me walking first toward Andernach, then back toward the forest, they said I’d made several trips, I’d buried the gold and diamonds. The valise never had been found! And besides, I was still battling my own feelings of remorse—whenever I started to speak, a pitiless voice would shout: ‘You did mean to commit the crime!’ Everything was against me, even myself! They questioned me about my comrade and I completely absolved him!

“They said, ‘We must find somebody here guilty—you, your comrade, the innkeeper, or his wife. This morning all the windows and doors were found latched from the inside!’

“At that, I was left speechless—without voice, without strength, without soul. More confident in my friend than I was of my own self, I could not accuse him. I understood that the two of us were considered equally complicit in the murder, and that I seemed the clumsier one! I tried to explain the crime by claiming somnambulism, hoping to clear my friend; I began to babble and lost the thread. I could see my conviction in my judges’ eyes. They could not suppress disbelieving smiles. It is over. No more uncertainty now. Tomorrow I’ll be shot . . . I’m not thinking of myself any longer,” he went on, “but my poor mother!” He stopped and looked up at the sky, no trace of tears, his eyes dry and blinking hard. “Frederic! He—”

“Ah, that’s it—Frederic!” cried Monsieur Hermann in triumph. “Yes, Frederic—that was his name, the other fellow—Frederic!”

My neighbor nudged my foot, and she nodded toward Monsieur Taillefer. The provisioner had negligently let his hand fall over his eyes, but between his fingers we saw what seemed a dark flame to his gaze.

“Hmm?” the woman murmured in my ear. “Suppose our friend’s first name is Frederic?”

“Frederic!” the young soldier cried. “Frederic deserted me—it’s vile, shameful! He must have been frightened. Maybe he hid somewhere in the inn, because that morning our two horses were still in the courtyard . . . What a mystery it is—incomprehensible.” After a moment of silence, he added, “Somnambulism! I had it only once in my life, and that was back when I was six years old . . .

“Am I to leave this life,” he went on, stamping his foot, “taking with me the last shred of friendship that existed in the world? Am I to die a double death, doubting a brotherly love begun at the age of five and carried on through school and university? Where is Frederic?”

“Let’s go inside,” he said. “I’d rather be back in my cell. I don’t want people to see me weeping. I will go to death bravely, but I cannot play the hero at a time when I feel the opposite, and I confess that I do mourn my young, wonderful life. All last night I couldn’t sleep; I was recalling scenes from my childhood, and I saw myself running through those fields . . . the memory that may have brought about my undoing.

“I had a future,” he said, interrupting himself. “Twelve men . . . an officer shouting, ‘Ready arms! Aim! Fire!,’ a drumroll, and then . . . infamy! That’s my future now! Oh, there is a God, there must be, or else all this makes no sense.”

Then he gripped me in his arms, a powerful embrace. “Ah, you will have been the last man I could pour out my soul to. You will be free, you! You will see your mother again! I don’t know if you are rich or poor, but it doesn’t matter! To me you are the whole world! These people won’t be fighting forever! So when there is peace again, go to Beauvais. If my mother survives the terrible news of my death, you will find her there. Bring her these words of consolation: ‘He was innocent!’ She will believe you. I will write her now, but you will bring her the last sight of me, you’ll tell her that you were the last man I embraced. Ah, how she will love you, the poor woman! You who will have been my last friend.

“Here,” he continued after a moment of silence, during which he seemed to buckle beneath the weight of his memories, “here, officers and soldiers are all strangers to me, and I horrify them. Without you, my innocence would always remain a secret between me and heaven.”

I swore I would faithfully carry out his last wishes. My words, my rush of feeling touched him. Shortly thereafter, the soldiers came and took him back to the court-martial. He was condemned to death. I do not know what formalities would accompany or follow that initial judgment; I do not know whether the young surgeon argued for his life in the course of the procedures; but he did expect to go to his ordeal the following morning, and he spent the night writing to his mother.

“We shall both be free,” he smiled when I went to see him the next day. “I am told that the general has signed your pardon.”

I stood silent, gazing at him to etch his features into my memory. Then his expression turned to disgust, and he said, “I have been a pitiful coward! All night long I begged these walls for deliverance.” And he pointed to the walls of his cell. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “I howled in despair, I rebelled, I went through the most terrible moral agonies. I was alone! Now, I consider what people will say . . . Courage is a costume worth putting on. I must go decently to my death. So . . .”

“Oh, don’t finish!” cried the girl who had asked for the story, and who now broke in on the Nuremberg visitor. “I want to stay unsure and believe that he was spared. If I hear now that he was shot, I will not sleep tonight. Tell me the rest tomorrow.”

We rose from the table. As she accepted Monsieur Hermann’s arm, my neighbor said to him, “He was shot, was he not?”

“He wished it, madame. There’s something very terrible about following behind the cortege of a living man, a man one loves, an innocent man! The poor lad never took his eyes off me. He seemed to be living only through me! He wanted . . . he said he wanted me to report his last sigh to his mother.”

“When the Treaty of Amiens was signed, I traveled to France to bring his mother the beautiful news of his innocence. I undertook the journey as a sacred pilgrimage. But Madame Magnan had died of consumption. With deep emotion, I burned the letter I was carrying. You may tease me for my German excessiveness, but for me there was a sublime, sad drama to the obscurity that would forever shroud those farewells calling between two graves, unheard by all the rest of creation, like a scream deep in the desert from a lone traveler set upon by a lion—”

I interrupted: “And suppose someone were to point out a man, right here in this drawing room, and tell you ‘This is the murderer!’ Would that not be drama too? And what would you do?”

“You’re behaving like a child, and very thoughtlessly,” my neighbor told me. “Look at Taillefer over there! Sitting in the easy chair by the fire, with Mademoiselle Fanny bringing him a cup of coffee. He’s smiling. Could a murderer—for whom that storytelling ought to have been torture—could he display such calm? Doesn’t he look the classic patriarchal figure!”

“Yes,” I exclaimed, “but go ask him whether he was in Germany during the war.”

“Why not?” she replied. And with that audacity women rarely lack when some project catches their fancy, or curiosity overtakes their imagination, my neighbor approached the provisioner.

“What’s that you’re saying, Taillefer?” the banker interposed. “Weren’t you handling the provisions for the Wagram campaign?”

“You’re mistaken, he seems a good fellow,” my neighbor said as she returned to my side.

“Oh?” I exclaimed. “Well, before this night is out I’ll flush the murderer out of his hiding place!”

Every day we come across some moral phenomenon that is astonishingly significant but yet is too simple to draw notice. If two men meet in a drawing room, one of them having reason to dislike or even hate the other, either from knowledge of some private and latent compromising information or over some undisclosed situation, or even over a revenge to come, the two will sense a chasm that separates them or could. They keep covert watch, preoccupied with each other; their glances, their gestures give off an indefinable emanation of their mutual awareness; there is a kind of magnet force between them. I do not know which exerts the stronger pull: vengeance or crime, hatred or insult. Like the priest who cannot consecrate the Host in the presence of an evil spirit, both men are uneasy, suspicious; the one may be polite, the other sullen, no telling which; the one blushes or blanches, the other quakes. Often the grudge-holder is as apprehensive as the victim; few people have the courage to commit an unpleasant act, even a necessary one; and many men keep silent or excuse a wrong out of reluctance to cause gossip, or from fear of some tragic outcome. Well, such an intussusception, such an intrusion of our souls and feelings caused a subtle struggle between the provisioner and myself. From the moment I first questioned him during Monsieur Hermann’s narrative, he had avoided my glances. He may have been avoiding those of the other guests as well! And now he was chatting with the unsophisticated Fanny, the banker’s daughter—probably, like all criminals, feeling the need to draw close to innocence, hoping to find some ease in its presence. Though I was some distance away, I was listening to him, and my piercing gaze held his own in a kind of fascination. When he thought he might examine me with impunity, our glances would meet, and his eyelids dropped instantly. Weary of the strain, Taillefer moved to end it by joining the card game. I went over to bet on his opponent, but hoping he would lose. My wish was granted: the fellow lost.

“Monsieur,” I said as he was dealing me my cards, “would you be so kind as to begin again?”

He promptly moved his chips from left to right. My dinner partner came to stand beside me; I threw her a meaningful glance.

“Would you be Monsieur Frederic Taillefer,” I asked him, “whose family I knew quite well in Beauvais?”

He dropped his cards, turned white, put his head between his hands, asked one of his bettors to take over his game, and stood up. “It is too warm in here!” he exclaimed. “I fear—”

He did not finish. His face suddenly looked terribly ill, and he hastily left the room. The master of the house saw Taillefer out, quite concerned about his state. My neighbor and I looked at each other, a kind of bitter disapproval on her face.

“Do you think your behavior is very merciful?” she asked, drawing me into a window recess as I left the card table after losing the game. “Would you assume the power to see into every heart? Why not let human justice and divine justice take their course? We might possibly avoid the one but never the other. Does a judge’s position strike you as enviable? You’ve practically played the executioner’s role tonight.”

“So, then . . . first you share and even stimulate my curiosity, and now you give me moral lessons?”

“In other words, it’s peace to scoundrels, war to the miserable, and deify wealth! But let’s drop the subject,” I went on, laughing. “Please look at the young lady who’s just entering the room.”

“I saw her three days ago at the Neapolitan ambassador’s ball, and I’ve fallen passionately in love with her. I beg you, tell me her name. No one there was able to.”

Her words were accompanied by a sardonic smile. Just then we heard violent, muffled screams. They seemed to come from a nearby apartment, and they resounded faintly through the gardens.

We turned all our attention to the sound as fearsome groans reached our ears. The banker’s wife ran hastily toward us and closed the window. “We must avoid any scenes,” she said. “If Mademoiselle Taillefer were to hear her father, she could have a nervous attack!”

The banker returned to the salon, sought out Victorine, and spoke quietly to her. The young woman uttered a cry, rushed to the door, and disappeared. The occurrence caused a great sensation. The games stopped. People questioned one another. The murmur of voices rose and groups formed.

“Killed himself?” my neighbor said, teasingly. “You’d be glad to wear mourning, I imagine!”

The mistress of the house replied, “The poor man, he has some disorder—I never do remember the name, although Dr. Brousson has told me often enough—and he has just had another attack.”

“Oh, it’s a terrible thing, monsieur,” she replied. “The doctors have no remedy for it. I understand the pain is atrocious. One day poor Taillefer had an attack while he was staying with me in the country, and I had to go to a neighbor’s house to get away from the sound. He screams horribly, he wants to kill himself: So his daughter had to have him lashed to his bed and put in a straitjacket. The poor man claims there are wild animals in his head, gnawing at his brain; it stabs and saws at him, this dreadful tugging inside every nerve. He has such pain in his head that he couldn’t even feel those burning moxa sticks they used to apply in an effort to relieve him, but Dr. Brousson—he engaged him as his doctor—forbade that treatment, saying that this is a nervous disorder, an inflammation of the nerves, and what he needed was leeches to the neck and opium on his head . . . indeed, the attacks do come less often, only once a year now, in late autumn. When he recovers, Taillefer says he would rather be put to the wheel than experience such pain again.”

“Well, he does seem to be suffering a great deal now,” said a broker, a fellow considered the wit among the group.

“Oh,” she continued, “last year he nearly died. He had gone out alone to his country property on some urgent business and had an attack; with no one there to help him, it seems he lay for twenty-two hours, stretched out stiff on the verge of death. Only a very hot bath brought him to.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s suffered for thirty years now; he says it began in the army, when a shot on board ship sent a wooden splinter into his head. But Brousson hopes to cure him. They say the English have discovered a safe way to treat the condition with prussic acid.”

Just then a scream more piercing than any before echoed through the house and sent a chill of horror through us.

“There, that’s what I was hearing every few moments,” the banker’s wife resumed. “It would make me leap out of my seat, it was a terrible strain on my nerves. But the strange thing is—even suffering such unimaginable pain, poor Taillefer is never at risk of dying from it. He eats and drinks normally in the intervals when the dreadful torture lets up. (Nature is very bizarre!) A German doctor told him it is a kind of gout of the head, and Brousson believes something similar.”

I left the group gathered around the mistress of the house and went to join Mademoiselle Taillefer, just as a valet came to fetch her.

“Ah, my God, my God!” she sobbed. “What did my father ever do against heaven to deserve to suffer this way? Such a good man!”

I went down the stairs with her, and as I helped her into her carriage I saw her father doubled over inside. Mademoiselle Taillefer tried to quiet her father’s moans, covering his mouth with her kerchief; unfortunately he caught sight of me, his face seemed to tighten still more, and a convulsive cry split the air. He gave me a hideous look, and the carriage drove off.

The dinner that evening had a cruel influence on my life and feelings. I loved Mademoiselle Taillefer, perhaps precisely because honor and decency forbade me to marry into the family of a murderer, no matter how good a father and husband he might be. Some incomprehensible force drove me to arrange my introduction into houses where I knew I might encounter Victorine. Often, after swearing that I would never see her again, the same evening I would find myself at her side. My pleasure was immense: My legitimate love, burdened by that chimerical remorse, came to feel like a criminal passion. I detested myself for greeting Taillefer civilly when he chanced to be with his daughter, but greet him I did!

Unfortunately Victorine is not merely a pretty woman—she is cultivated, full of talents and grace, without the least pedantry or the faintest hint of pretention. She is reserved in conversation, her nature has a melancholy grace that no one can resist; she loves me, or at least she lets me think so; she has a certain smile she reveals to no one but myself; and when she speaks to me her voice grows gentler still. Oh, she does love me—but she adores her father; but she praises his goodness, his kindness, his exquisite qualities. These tributes become so many dagger thrusts into my heart.

One day I almost implicated myself in the crime of the Taillefer family’s wealth: I nearly proposed to Victorine. So I fled. I traveled—I went to Germany, to Andernach . . .

But then I returned. I found Victorine pale, grown thin! If I had found her hearty and merry, I would have been spared. But now my passion flared anew with extraordinary force. Fearing that my scruples could degenerate into monomania, I decided to convoke a Sanhedrin, a council of unbiased minds, to cast some light onto this ethical and philosophical problem. The issue had become more complicated since my return.

Two days ago I gathered those of my friends whom I consider to possess the greatest degree of probity, delicacy, and honor. I invited two Englishmen (one a secretary at the embassy and one a Puritan), a former French government minister (now a mature political figure), a few young fellows still living in a rapture of innocence, an elderly priest, my old guardian (an unsophisticated man who handed in so fine a guardianship report on me that the Palace still remembers it), as well as a lawyer, a notary, a judge . . . That is, a range of social viewpoints, of practical capacities. We began with good food, good talk, a good boisterous racket; then, at dessert, I gave a straightforward account of my story and, without disclosing the name of my beloved, I asked for some solid counsel.

“Advise me, my friends,” I said as I ended the tale. “Discuss the question seriously, as if it were a legislative proposal. The voting urn and the billiard balls will be brought in, and you will vote for or against my marrying, with all the confidentiality proper to an election.”

Suddenly a deep silence fell. The notary recused himself: “I have a pressing contract to draw up.”

The wine had reduced my old guardian to silence, and soon I put him into the hands of another guardian to see that no accident should befall him on his way home.

“I understand!” I exclaimed. “Not giving me an opinion tells me very emphatically what I must do.”

“What is the problem?” asked a duke, whose fortune consisted of property confiscated from the Protestants who resisted the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The attorney rose. “As a matter of law, the case before us would not pose the slightest difficulty. Monsieur the duke is correct!” declared the legal mouthpiece. “There is such a thing as a statute of limitations. Where would we all be if it were required to look into the source of every fortune! This is a matter of conscience. If you insist on seeking an answer from some tribunal, go to the one that deals with penitence—the confessional.” That said, the code incarnate sat back down and swallowed a glass of champagne.

The man charged with explicating the Gospel, the good priest, rose to his feet. “God made us frail things,” he declared firmly. “If you love the heiress to the crime, marry her, but take only the property she inherited from her mother’s side and give the father’s portion to the poor.”

“But,” exclaimed one of those merciless quibblers so commonly found in social circles, “the father himself may have married so well only because of his ill-gotten fortune. Thus, even the least of his privileges might be considered a fruit of his crime.”

“This very discussion is itself a verdict. There are some matters a man does not puzzle over,” declared my former tutor, who believed he was enlightening the group by this drunken sally.

A man of the Doctrinaire Party, who had missed election to the parliament by one hundred fifty votes out of one hundred fifty-five, rose to speak. “Messieurs, this phenomenal accident, intellectual in its nature, is the sort of event that stands out most vividly from the usual conditions ruling society,” he intoned. “Thus, the decision should be reached through an extemporaneous act of consciousness, a sudden idea, an instructive judgment, an ephemeral nuance of our inmost apprehension, akin to the flashes that make up the sensation of taste. Let us vote.”

I had supplied each man with two balls, one white and one red. The white, symbol of virginity, would rule out the marriage; the red ball would favor it. Out of delicacy, I myself abstained from voting. My friends numbered seventeen, thus nine would make an absolute majority. Each person stepped up to drop a ball into a narrow-necked reed basket used to shake up the numbered marbles that tournament players draw to determine their order; we were spurred on by lively curiosity, for the idea of deciding a strictly ethical question by ballot was quite novel.

In the end I counted nine white balls! A result that didn’t surprise me, though I did consider how many men my own age I had invited to join my tribunal. There were nine of these casuists, and they all felt the same.

“Ah!” I thought. “There is an unspoken unanimity here in favor of the marriage, and another unanimity against it! How shall I get out of this fix?

“Where does the father-in-law live?” blurted one of my classmates, who was less clever at dissembling than the others.

“There is no longer a father-in-law,” I declared. “Until recently, my conscience spoke clearly enough to make it superfluous to ask your advice. That voice may be weaker now, and here is the reason for my uncertainty: Two months ago I received this enchanting letter.”

YOU ARE INVITED TO ATTEND

THE FUNERAL PROCESSION, SERVICE, AND INTERMENT

OF MONSIEUR JEAN-FREDERIC TAILLEFER

OF THE MAISON TAILLEFER & COMPANY,

FORMER PROVISIONER OF MEATS TO THE ARMY COMMISSARY,

IN HIS LIFETIME CHEVALIER OF THE LEGION OF HONOR

AND OF THE GOLDEN SPUR,

CAPTAIN OF THE FIRST COMPANY OF GRENADIERS

OF THE SECOND LEGION OF THE NATIONAL GUARD OF PARIS

DIED MAY 1 IN HIS HOUSE ON RUE JOUBERT

WHICH WILL TAKE PLACE AT . . .

SENT BY . . .

“Now what do I do?” I went on. “I shall set you the question very broadly. There is certainly a pool of blood in Mademoiselle Taillefer’s estate; the father’s legacy is bloodstained ground, I know that. But Prosper Magnan left no heirs; I have been unable to locate the family of the pin manufacturer who was murdered at Andernach. To whom, then, should the fortune be ‘restored’? And should it be the whole fortune that is restored? Have I the right to disclose a truth discovered by chance; the right to add a decapitated head to the dowry of an innocent girl, to cause her to dream bad dreams, to strip her of a cherished illusion, to kill off her father a second time by telling her, ‘Your every sou is stained with blood’? I borrowed an old churchman’s copy of the Dictionary of Problems of Conscience, and I found no solution to resolve my doubts. Set up a religious fund to pray for Prosper Magnan, or for Walhenfer, or for Taillefer? This is the middle of the nineteenth century! Build a hospice or establish some award for good works? The prize would go to rascals. As for most of our hospitals, they seem to have become havens for vice these days! And anyhow, such grants, which mainly benefit personal vanity, would they constitute ‘reparations’? And do I even owe reparations?

“And finally—I am in love, passionately so. My love is my life! If, without disclosing my reasons, I should propose marriage to a young woman who is accustomed to luxury, to elegance, to a life rich in enjoyment of the arts, a girl who loves listening idly to Rossini’s music from a box at the Bouffons opera house—well, if I propose that she should deprive herself of one hundred fifty thousand francs for the sake of some doddering old folks or some hypothetical invalids, she’ll laugh and turn her back on me, or her companion will tell her I’m a cruel prankster. If in an ecstasy of love I should urge the delights of a modest existence in a little house on the banks of the Loire, if I ask her to sacrifice her Parisian life in the name of our love, first of all that would be a virtuous lie, and second I might have a sorry experience and lose the heart of a girl who loves dancing, is mad about fine clothes, and for the time being is mad about me. She’ll be carried off by some slim dandy of an officer with a pretty curled mustache who plays the piano, makes much of Lord Byron, and cuts a fine figure on horseback. What to do? Messieurs, I beg you—tell me!”

The upright fellow, the Puritan gentleman who looked like Jeanie Deans’s father in the Waverley novel, whom I had briefly mentioned before and who till now had said not a word, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Idiot! Why on earth did you ever ask him if he came from Beauvais!”