21 July, 1 o’clock in the morning.
My dear friend,
I do not know whether or not you are at home – which is where I am sending this letter – or whether, like me, you are still here in this private prison. In either case, these words, whether received now or later, will prove to be, for whichever of us may read them, a useful memorandum of some of the most extraordinary hours of our lives.
I am writing more in order to impose some order on events and fix them in my memory rather than for some other purely hypothetical purpose. I will deliver these few pages of personal reflections to the discretion – or vagaries – of the post, reserving the right to ask you to return them to me in the fullness of time.
I have had no news of you since we were separated last night, shortly after we entered the drawing room where the corpse was lying. The masked man who had been charged with escorting me to the room in which I am now sitting, took me by the arm and whispered into my ear the name of a woman, a street and the number of a house. It was the name of someone you know very well and the address was that of the house where she lives! I believe I inadvertently shuddered, but nonetheless managed to say calmly enough:
‘I don’t understand.’
This individual was the same one who had remained silent throughout our ride in the carriage, the one who kept such an attentive, suspicious eye on me when we arrived at the house. His build, his manner of speaking, his voice, though barely audible, were not unfamiliar to me.
Speaking even more softly, he responded:
‘You won’t be able to leave here for another two or three days. So if you need to write a letter or send a message…’
A thought occurred to me: What if he were…?
There was one way of finding out if he was or wasn’t a close friend of mine: all I needed was to get hold of his watch; even blindfolded, I could identify its owner simply by running my hand over it. If he was the person I thought he was, his watch case would be as smooth as enamel, apart from a raised coat of arms in the centre.
‘I’ll write a brief note,’ I said. ‘Could you bring me a pencil?’
We had reached the room in which I was to stay and I removed my blindfold just as he was leaving the room promising to bring me the necessary writing implements. However, the masked man who came back bearing pen and paper was not the same one who had just left! So I missed my chance to confirm a suspicion or dispel a doubt.
I did, however, write a few lines to my servant reassuring him about my absence.
‘Is that all?’ the stranger asked, taking the note from me.
‘Yes, that’s all.’
A sense of delicacy and a shadow of mistrust prevented me from writing directly to the person the previous masked man had referred to.
The man shut the door, and I was left alone.
I found myself in an interior room, quite spacious, but without a window. To one side there was a washstand; stacked in one corner were three steamer trunks in studded Warsaw leather, all of them bearing labels from railways, hotels and steamship companies. The topmost of the three trunks bore, on a strip of paper, the words ‘Grand Hotel Paris’ in large black letters, and one of the labels was from an English steamship on the India run. On the other side of the room was a bed. The only other furniture in that modestly furnished room was a sofa, upholstered in green morocco, placed in the centre of the room facing a broad table on which my supper was laid out beneath the bright light of a lamp.
May I make a confession? I found the isolation, peace and solitude a great relief after the day’s surfeit of excitement.
I stretched out on the sofa and lay there, staring up at the wavering circle of light projected onto the ceiling through the hole in the top of the lampshade, and gradually my frantic heartbeats slowed to be replaced by long yawns accompanied by a lot of nervous stretching, all gently inviting me to sleep. My imagination was still busy, however, with the kind of unconscious work normally carried out by dreams, and it kept extracting from the scene I had just witnessed the most illogical and far-fetched interpretations. Everything that had happened to us between the encounter on the Sintra Road and entering this room was whirling madly about in the air like a vast allegorical enigma, fragments of which were being kicked around by a squad of jeering devils, who laughed and poked their little red-hot tongues out at me.
I sank quietly into a state of languid indifference, my eyelids drooped, and I fell asleep.
On waking after a brief, but peaceful and refreshing nap, I turned my attention to the supper glittering before my eyes.
On the table was a loaf of bread, a tin of sardines from Nantes, a little terrine of pâté de foie gras, a partridge, a wedge of cheese and three bottles of Burgundy with green wax seals; next to these stood four bottles of soda-water. The corkscrew was tucked inside the silver napkin ring. On a metal tray lay a sheaf of plump, glossy, chocolate-brown cigars, bound together at either end by bands of crimson silk. On top of the tin of sardines lay the key required to open it. The glass was of the finest crystal, the fork was silver gilt, the knife-handle mother-of-pearl, and the plates were of white porcelain edged in gold and green. I immediately sprang to my feet. I sat down on the sofa and felt hunger climb onto my back, draw my head down over the supper, wrap its wiry legs around my waist and dig the spurs of greed into my empty stomach.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the table, the phantom of fear reared up, fixed me with its eyes and, in a solemn, prohibitive gesture, held out a gaunt, tremulous hand over the delicacies. Puzzled and confused, I listened then to the brief conversation going on inside myself, similar to that which, from time to time, Xavier de Maistre had with his ‘beast’ during his journey round his room.
I heard a slow, grave voice say:
‘Consider what you’re doing, O foolhardy one! Open your eyes, you thoughtless mortal! That partridge, whose insidious, perfidious breast glows golden before your eyes, has been seasoned with arsenic. That Chambertin burgundy – which waits for you like a wave on the Stygian Lake, lurking behind that apparently innocent, elegant, inviting label – is, in fact, as dark and deadly as the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s Feast, for this wine, offering you a hypocritical, deceitful kiss, is laced with prussic acid. Those ducks’ livers stuffed with lewd, corrupting, licentious truffles have been cooked in lethal sauces concocted in the Borgias’ kitchens!’
The other voice, low and wheedling, was singing a soft siren song:
‘Come on, fool, eat if you’re hungry! Or are you scared of the bogeyman, you nincompoop? Look at that wax seal: aren’t the characters stamped on the stopper a sure guarantee of the purity of the liquid within? And that tin of sardines – caught off the coast of France and cooked six months ago in Marseilles – was hermetically sealed and soldered with meticulous care. And that terrine of foie gras has been equally religiously sealed and bears Chevet of Paris’s impeccable, nay, sacred label. Do you really believe, Mr Self-Important, that half the world has conspired to snatch away your worthless life? Eat, drink and sleep. Chance is offering you these pleasant hours of solitude in the arms of erudition, so make the most of them. Then you can enjoy conversing with yourself as you recline on the warm breast of melancholy, that delicious enchantress who appears only to lovers and the lonely, and who, they say, is the spoiled, more fortunate younger sister of sadness!’
By this time, I had opened the tin of sardines, prised open the foie gras, uncorked a bottle of wine and poured it into my glass with a little soda water!
Then I devoted myself to eating, with appetite, courage, delight and a kind of animal sensuality, feeling all the while that somewhere around me fluttered the beneficent spirits that had protected Silvio Pellico as he languished in prison in Venice.
And most remarkable of all: I felt really well!
After supper, I lit a cigar and began pacing the floor, saying to myself:
‘Right, let’s take a little stroll around the countryside!’
On the wall to the left of the main door to the room was another door. I examined it. It was bolted. The bed stood in the way, so I pushed it to one side and opened the door to reveal a long, deep cupboard built into the wall with, halfway up, a broad, solid shelf.
It occurred to me that at the back of the cupboard there could perhaps be a party wall through which it might be possible for me to hear what was going on in the house next door.
I entered the cupboard, lay down on the shelf and listened. From the other side came a loud, low rumble. It sounded as if a large, cumbersome piece of furniture were being dragged across the floor.
I found that the back of the cupboard was indeed only a thin partition. It may be that it had once been a door. There was even a place where some of the plaster had crumbled away. I could see part of a bare wooden batten that lay diagonally across.
I fetched the corkscrew and painstakingly bored away the remaining plaster until I had made an imperceptible hole that enabled me to see some light and to hear clearly what was being said on the other side.
This is what was going on, at half past eleven at night, in the room next door to my ‘prison cell’.