8
But while it is true that the spectators, on leaving the theatre, had regained their habitual calm and peacefully made their way home with no trace of their experience other than a passing stupor, they had nonetheless been subjected to an extraordinary sense of intense excitement and, feeling exhausted, shattered, as if they had overindulged at table, they collapsed into their beds.
Now, the following day, each of them had, as it were, a flashback to what had happened to them the day before. One was missing his hat, lost in the brawl, another had lost a flap of his jacket, torn in the mêlée; one woman had lost her fine prunella shoe, another the cloak she wore on special occasions. Memory returned to these upstanding middle-class people and, with memory, a certain shame at their indescribable high spirits. It appeared to them as an orgy in which they had unconsciously played the part of the protagonists! They didn’t talk about it – they preferred not to think about it.
But the most dumbfounded person in the whole town was in fact Burgomaster van Tricasse. The following morning, when he awoke, he couldn’t find his wig. Lotchè had looked everywhere. Nothing. The wig had been left on the battlefield. As for having the town trumpeter, Jean Mistrol, advertise its loss – no: it was better to sacrifice one’s hairpiece than to make an exhibition of oneself, when one had the honour to be the principal magistrate in the community.
These were the worthy van Tricasse’s reflections as he lay stretched out under his blankets, his body tired and aching, his head heavy, his tongue furred, his lungs burning. He felt not the slightest desire to get up – quite the opposite – and his brain worked harder this whole morning than it had done for perhaps forty years. The honourable magistrate went over in his head every individual moment of that inexplicable performance. He compared it with the events which had recently occurred that evening at Dr Ox’s. He tried to find the reasons behind this bizarre excitability which, on two occasions, had manifested itself among the most dependable of the citizens under his charge.
“Whatever can be happening?” he kept asking himself. “What spirit of giddy delirium has taken hold of my peaceable town of Quiquendone? Are we all going off our heads, and will the town have to be turned into a huge asylum? After all, there we all were yesterday: notables, councillors, judges, barristers, doctors, academicians – and all of us, if my memory is correct, all of us fell prey to this attack of wild mania! Whatever could there have been in that infernal music? It’s inexplicable! And yet I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything which might have produced such a state of overexcitement in myself! No – yesterday all I had for dinner was a slice of overdone veal, a few spoonfuls of mashed spinach, a dish of floating islands and two glasses of weak beer diluted with pure water – nothing that would go to my head! No. There’s something I can’t explain, and as, after all, I’m responsible for the actions of those in my charge, I will set up an inquiry.”
But the inquiry, approved by the town council, produced no results. If the facts were self-evident, the causes escaped the sagacity of the magistrates. In any case, calm had been restored in everyone’s mind, and with calm came a forgetting of all the excesses they had committed. The newspapers of the locality did not so much as mention them, and the review of the performance, which appeared in the Quiquendone Recorder, made no allusion to the way a whole auditorium had succumbed to such feverish behaviour.
And yet, though the town fell back into its habitual impassivity, though it became once more, in appearance, as Flemish as it had been before, there was a feeling that, basically, the character and temperament of its inhabitants was gradually changing. You could have truly said, as did Dr Dominique Custos, that “they were starting to develop a nervous system”.
We should make things clear, however. This indisputable and undisputed change occurred only in certain conditions. When the Quiquendonians walked through the streets of the town, out in the fresh air, in the squares or along the Vaar, they were still those fine, cold and methodical folk that they had been before. The same applied when they kept themselves shut in their homes, some of them engaged in manual labour and others in mental labour, the latter doing nothing and the former not thinking. Their private lives were silent, inert, vegetative, as they had been for so long. They did not quarrel or scold each other in their households – there was no acceleration in their heartbeats, no overexcitement of their spinal cords. Their average pulse remained what it had been in the good old days: between fifty and fifty-two per minute.
But (and this was an absolutely inexplicable phenomenon, which would have baffled the sagacity of the most ingenious physiologists of the period) while the inhabitants of Quiquendone were quite unchanged in their private lives, they were, on the contrary, undergoing a visible transformation in the life they lived together – in those relations between individuals attendant on communal life.
So, if they met together in a public building, it “didn’t work out like it used to”, to use the expression of Commissioner Passauf. In the stock exchange, in the town hall, in the chamber of the Academy, in council sessions and in scholarly assemblies, a sort of revitalization occurred, and a strange overexcitability soon took hold of those present. After an hour, relations between them were already strained. After two hours, the discussion had degenerated into a dispute. Tempers flared, and they started attacking each other personally. Even at church, during the sermon, the faithful could not listen in a cool and collected way to Minister van Stabel – who, indeed, started making sweeping gestures from his pulpit and delivered severer admonitions to them than usual. Eventually this state of things led to even greater altercations than the one between Dr Custos and Barrister Schut, but they never required the intervention of authority, since once the parties in the quarrel had returned home, they calmed down and forgot all about the insults they had given and received.
Nonetheless, this strange fact had made no impression on minds absolutely incapable of recognizing what was going on within themselves. A single person in the town, the very same one whose job the council had been thinking of suppressing for thirty years, the civil commissioner, Michel Passauf, had noticed that this overexcitement, while absent from private houses, manifested itself rapidly in public buildings, and he asked himself, not without a certain anxiety, what would happen when this arousal spread as far as the homes of the burghers, and when the epidemic – this was the word he used, appropriately enough – spilt over into the streets of the town. Then insults would not be forgotten, peace and quiet would have vanished, the delirium would no longer be merely sporadic but would have permanently inflamed everyone’s temper, and this would inevitably set the Quiquendonians violently against one another.
“And then what will happen?” Commissioner Passauf wondered fearfully. “How can those savage outbreaks of fury be stopped? How can those goaded temperaments be kept in check? In such circumstances, my office will no longer be a sinecure, and the council will really have to double my salary… unless I am forced to arrest myself… for a breach of the peace and public disorder!”
And these all too justified fears started to come true. From the stock exchange, the church, the theatre, the town hall, the academy and the covered market, the disease invaded the homes of individuals – less than a fortnight after that terrible performance of Les Huguenots.
It was in the home of the banker, Collaert, that the first symptoms of the epidemic appeared.
This wealthy personage was giving a ball, or at least a dance, for the town’s notables. He had, a few months previously, floated a loan of thirty thousand francs which had been three-quarters subscribed, and to mark this financial success he had opened his salons and thrown a party for his compatriots.
Everyone knows what these Flemish receptions are like: pure and tranquil occasions on which beer and soft drinks, prodigally served, are the only drinks provided. A few conversations on the weather, the appearance of the harvests, the fine state of the gardens, the tending of the flowers and more particularly the tulips; from time to time a slow, stiff dance, like a minuet, sometimes a waltz, but one of those German waltzes that involve no more than one and a half turns to the minute, and during which the waltzers hold one another in an embrace as distant as their arms will possibly permit – such was the usual demeanour of those balls which the high society of Quiquendone used to frequent. Even the polka, after having been set to a four-four time, had made a real effort to gain acceptance here; but the dancers could never keep up with the orchestra, however slowly the tempo was beat, and the attempt had been perforce abandoned.
These peaceful gatherings, at which young men and women enjoyed themselves in a measured and decent fashion, had never led to any unpleasantness. So why was it that on that particular evening, at the home of the banker Collaert, the soft drinks and cordial seemed to transform themselves into heady wines, sparkling champagne and incendiary glasses of punch? Why, around the middle of the party, did a sort of inexplicable intoxication overcome all the guests? Why did the minuet slip into a saltarello? Why did the musicians in the orchestra start to speed up? Why was it that, just as in the theatre, the candles gleamed with an unaccustomed dazzle? What electric current invaded the banker’s salons? What caused the couples to draw closer to one another, their arms to clasp one another in a more convulsive embrace, and the cavaliers seuls to distinguish themselves by essaying a few daring steps during the fourth figure of this quadrille that had once been so grave, so solemn, so majestic, so comme il faut?*
Alas! What Oedipus would have been able to answer all these insoluble questions?* Commissioner Passauf, who was present at the occasion, could clearly see the gathering storm, but he could not hold it at bay, he could not flee it, and he felt a kind of intoxication rising to his brain. All his physiological faculties and all his passionate impulses grew in intensity. He was seen, several times over, pouncing on the sweets and snaffling the contents of every tray as if he had just come off a long diet.
During this time, the ball became increasingly animated. A prolonged murmur, like a muffled hum, escaped from every breast. People were dancing, really dancing. Their feet shimmied and capered along with a growing frenzy. Their faces gleamed like carbuncles. The general ferment reached new heights of intensity.
And when the orchestra struck up the waltz from Der Freischütz,* when the hired musicians launched with feverish gesticulations into this waltz, so German and so slow in tempo – ah! – it was no longer a waltz: it was a demented whirlwind, a dizzying vortex, a gyration worthy of being conducted by some Faust beating time with a burning brand from hell! Then a gallop, an infernal gallop, lasting an hour, without anyone being able to slow it down or bring it to a pause, dragged everyone along in its train as it rapidly twisted and turned through rooms, salons, antechambers and staircases, from cellar to attic of this opulent abode: young men, young women, fathers, mothers, individuals of every age, of every weight, of every sex: the fat banker Collaert, and Mme Collaert, and the councillors, and the magistrates, and the chief judge, and Niklausse, and Mme van Tricasse, and Burgomaster van Tricasse, and Commissioner Passauf himself, who could never remember who had been his waltz partner during that night of intoxication!
But she could never forget him. And ever since that day, she sees in her dreams, again and again, the ardent commissioner clasping her in a passionate embrace! And she was… dear old Aunty Némance!