The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 3

"Suddenly, it seemed to me as if the slab of marble on which I was sitting, was moving. Certainly, it was moving, as if it were being raised. With a bound, I sprang on to the neighboring tomb, and I saw, yes, I distinctly saw the stone which I had just quitted, rise upright, and the dead person appeared, a naked skeleton, which was pushing the stone back with its bent back. I saw it quite clearly, although the night was so dark. On the cross I could read:

"'Here lies Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He loved his family, was kind and honorable, and died in the grace of the Lord.'

"The dead man also read what was inscribed on his tombstone; then he picked up a stone off the path, a little, pointed stone, and began to scrape the letters carefully. He slowly effaced them altogether, and with the hollows of his eyes he looked at the places where they had been engraved, and, with the tip of the bone, that had been his forefinger, he wrote in luminous letters, like those lines which one traces on walls with the tip of a lucifer match:

"'Here reposes Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He hastened his father's death by his unkindness, as he wished to inherit his fortune, he tortured his wife, tormented his children, deceived his neighbors, robbed everyone he could, and died wretched.'

"When he had finished writing, the dead man stood motionless, looking at his work, and on turning round I saw that all the graves were open, that all the dead bodies had emerged from them, and that all had effaced the lies inscribed on the gravestones by their relations, and had substituted the truth instead. And I saw that all had been tormentors of their neighbors – malicious, dishonest, hypocrites, liars, rogues, calumniators, envious; that they had stolen, deceived, performed every disgraceful, every abominable action, these good fathers, these faithful wives, these devoted sons, these chaste daughters, these honest tradesmen, these men and women who were called irreproachable, and they were called irreproachable, and they were all writing at the same time, on the threshold of their eternal abode, the truth, the terrible and the holy truth which everybody is ignorant of, or pretends to be ignorant of, while the others are alive.

"I thought that she also must have written something on her tombstone, and now, running without any fear among the half-open coffins, among the corpses and skeletons, I went towards her, sure that I should find her immediately. I recognized her at once, without seeing her face, which was covered by the winding-sheet, and on the marble cross, where shortly before I had read: 'She loved, was loved, and died,' I now saw: 'Having gone out one day, in order to deceive her lover, she caught cold in the rain and died.'"

"It appears that they found me at daybreak, lying on the grave unconscious."

THE LAST STEP

Monsier de Saint-Juéry would not have deceived his old mistress for anything in the world: perhaps from an instinctive fear that he had heard of adventures that turn out badly, make a noise, and bring about hateful family quarrels, crises from which one emerges enervated and exasperated with destiny, and, as it were, with the weight of a bullet on one's feet, and also from his requirement for a calm, sheep-like existence, whose monotony was never disturbed by any shock, and perhaps from the remains of the love which had so entirely made him, during the first years of their connection, the slave of the proud, dominating beauty, and of the enthralling charm of that woman.

He kept out of the way of temptation almost timidly, and was faithful to her, and as submissive as a spaniel. He paid her every attention, did not appear to notice that the outlines of her figure, which had formerly been so harmonious and supple, were getting too full and puffy, that her face, which used to remind him of a blush rose, was getting wrinkled, and that her eyes were getting dull. He admired her in spite of everything, almost blindly, and clothed her with imaginary charms, with an autumnal beauty, with the majestic and serene softness of an October twilight, and with the last blossoms which unfold by the side of the walks, strewn with dead leaves.

But although their connection had lasted for many years, though they were as closely bound to each other as if they had been married, and although Charlotte Guindal pestered him with entreaties, and upset him with continual quarrels on the subject, and, in spite of the fact that he believed her to be absolutely faithful to him, and worthy of his most perfect confidence and love, yet Monsieur de Saint-Juéry had never been able to make up his mind to give her his name, and to put their false position on a legal footing.

He really suffered from this, but remained firm and defended his position, quibbled, sought for subterfuges, replied by the eternal and vague: "What would be the good of it," which nearly sent Charlotte mad, made her furious and caused her to say angry and ill-tempered things. But he remained passive and listless, with his back bent like a restive horse under the whip.

He asked her whether it was really necessary to their happiness, as they had no children? Did not everybody think that they were married? Was not she everywhere called Madame de Saint-Juéry, and had their servants any doubt that they were in the service of respectable, married people? Was not the name which had been transmitted to a man from father to son, intact, honored, and often with a halo of glory round it, a sacred trust which no one had a right to touch? What would she gain if she bore it legitimately? Did she for a moment suppose that she would rise higher in people's estimation, and be more admitted into society, or that people would forget that she had been his regular mistress before becoming his wife? Did not everybody know that formerly, before he rescued her from that Bohemian life in which she had been waiting for her chance in vain, and was losing her good looks, Charlotte Guindal frequented all the public balls, and showed her legs liberally at the Moulin-Rouge12.

Charlotte knew his crabbed, though also kindly character, which was at the same time logical and obstinate, too well to hope that she would ever be able to overcome his opposition and scruples, except by some clever woman's trick, some well-acted scene in a comedy; so she appeared to be satisfied with his reasons, and to renounce her bauble, and outwardly she showed an equable and conciliatory temper, and no longer worried Monsieur de Saint-Juéry with her recriminations, and thus the time went by, in calm monotony, without fruitless battles or fierce assaults.

Charlotte Guindal's medical man was Doctor Rabatel, one of those clever men who appear to know everything, but whom a country bone-setter would reduce to a "why?" by a few questions; one of those men who wish to impress everybody with their apparent value, and who make use of their medical knowledge as if it were some productive commercial house, which carried on a suspicious business; who can scent out those persons whom they can manage as they please, as if they were a piece of soft wax, who keep them in a continual state of terror, by keeping the idea of death constantly before their eyes.

They soon manage to obtain the mastery over such persons, scrutinize their consciences as well as the cleverest priest could do, make sure of being well paid for their complicity as soon as they have obtained a footing anywhere, and drain their patients of their secrets, in order to use them as a weapon for extorting money on occasions. He felt sure immediately that this middle-aged lady wanted something of him, as by some extraordinary perversion of taste, he was rather fond of the remains of a good-looking woman, if they were well got up, and offered to him; of that high flavor which arises from soft lips, which had been made tender through years of love, from gray hair powdered with gold, from a body engaged in its last struggle, and which dreams of one more victory before abdicating power altogether, he did not hesitate to become his new patient's lover.

When winter came, however, a thorough change took place in Charlotte's health, that had hitherto been so good. She had no strength left, she felt ill after the slightest exertion, complained of internal pains, and spent whole days lying on the couch, with set eyes and without uttering a word, so that everybody thought that she was dying of one of those mysterious maladies which cannot be coped with, but which, by degrees, undermines the whole system. It was sad to see her rapidly sinking, lying motionless on her pillows, while a mist seemed to have come over her eyes, and her hands lay helplessly on the bed and her mouth seemed sealed by some invisible finger. Monsieur de Saint-Juéry was in despair; he cried like a child, and he suffered as if somebody had plunged a knife into him, when the doctor said to him in his unctuous voice:

"I know that you are a brave man, my dear sir, and I may venture to tell you the whole truth… Madame de Saint-Juéry is doomed, irrevocably doomed… Nothing but a miracle can save her, and alas! there are no miracles in these days. The end is only a question of a few hours, and may come quite suddenly…"

Monsieur de Saint-Juéry had thrown himself into a chair, and was sobbing bitterly, covering his face with his hands.

"My poor dear, my poor darling," he said, through his tears.

"Pray compose yourself, and be brave," the doctor continued, sitting down by his side, "for I have to say something serious to you, and to convey to you our poor patient's last wishes… A few minutes ago, she told me the secret of your double life, and of your connection with her… And now, in view of death, which she feels approaching so rapidly, for she is under no delusion, the unhappy woman wishes to die at peace with heaven, with the consolation of having regulated her equivocal position, and of having become your wife."

Monsieur de Saint-Juéry sat upright, with a bewildered look, while he moved his hands nervously; in his grief he was incapable of manifesting any will of his own, or of opposing this unexpected attack.

"Oh! anything that Charlotte wishes, doctor; anything, and I will myself go and tell her so, on my knees!"

The wedding took place discreetly, with something funereal about it, in the darkened room, where the words which were spoken had a strange sound, almost of anguish. Charlotte, who was lying in bed, with her eyes dilated through happiness, had put both trembling hands into those of Monsieur de Saint-Juéry, and she seemed to expire with the word: "Yes" on her lips. The doctor looked at the moving scene, grave and impassive, with his chin buried in his white cravat, and his two arms resting on the mantel-piece, while his eyes twinkled behind his glasses…

The next week, Madame de Saint-Juéry began to get better, and that wonderful recovery about which Monsieur de Saint-Juéry tells everybody with effusive gratitude, who will listen to him, has so increased Doctor Rabatel's reputation, that at the next election he will be made a member of the Academy of Medicine.

THE WILL

I knew that tall young fellow, René de Bourneval. He was an agreeable man, though of a rather melancholy turn of mind, who seemed prejudiced against everything, very skeptical, and able to tear worldly hypocrisies to pieces. He often used to say:

"There are no honorable men, or at any rate, they only appear so when compared to low people."

He had two brothers, whom he never saw, the Messieurs de Courcils, and I thought they were by another father, on account of the difference in the name. I had frequently heard that something strange had happened in the family, but I did not know the details.

As I took a great liking to him, we soon became intimate, and one evening, when I had been dining with him alone, I asked him by chance: "Are you by your mother's first or second marriage?" He grew rather pale, and then flushed, and did not speak for a few moments; he was visibly embarrassed. Then he smiled in a melancholy and gentle manner, which was peculiar to him, and said:

"My dear friend, if it will not weary you, I can give you some very strange particulars about my life. I know that you are a sensible man, so I do not fear that our friendship will suffer by my revelations, and should it suffer, I should not care about having you for my friend any longer.

"My mother, Madame de Courcils, was a poor little timid woman, whom her husband had married for the sake of her fortune, and her whole life was one of martyrdom. Of a loving, delicate mind, she was constantly being ill-treated by the man who ought to have been my father, one of those bores called country gentleman. A month after their marriage he was living with a servant, and besides that, the wives and daughters of his tenants were his mistresses, which did not prevent him from having three children by his wife, or three, if you count me in. My mother said nothing, and lived in that noisy house like a little mouse. Set aside, disparaged, nervous, she looked at people with her bright, uneasy, restless eyes, the eyes of some terrified creature which can never shake off its fear. And yet she was pretty, very pretty and fair, a gray-blonde, as if her hair had lost its color through her constant fears.

"Among Monsieur de Courcil's friends who constantly came to the château, there was an ex-cavalry officer, a widower, a man who was feared, who was at the same time tender and violent, capable of the most energetic resolutions, Monsieur de Bourneval, whose name I bear. He was a tall, thin man, with a heavy black moustache, and I am very like him. He was a man who had read a great deal, and whose ideas were not like those of most of his class. His great-grandmother had been a friend of J.J. Rousseau's, and one might have said that he had inherited something of this ancestral connection. He knew the Contrat Social, and the Nouvelle Héloîse by heart, and all those philosophical books which long beforehand prepared the overthrow of our old usages, prejudices, superannuated laws and imbecile morality.

"It seems that he loved my mother, and she loved him, but their intrigue was carried on so secretly, that no one guessed it. The poor, neglected, unhappy woman, must have clung to him in a despairing manner, and in her intimacy with him must have imbibed all his ways of thinking, theories of free thought, audacious ideas of independent love; but as she was so timid that she never ventured to speak aloud, it was all driven back, condensed and expressed in her heart, which never opened itself.

"My two brothers were very hard towards her, like their father was, and never gave her a caress, and, used to seeing her count for nothing in the house, they treated her rather like a servant, and so I was the only one of her sons who really loved her, and whom she loved.

"When she died, I was seventeen, and I must add, in order that you may understand what follows, that there had been a law suit between my father and my mother, and that their property had been separated, to my mother's advantage, as, thanks to the tricks of the law, and the intelligent devotion of a lawyer to her interests, she had preserved the right of making her will in favor of anyone she pleased.

"We were told that there was a will lying at the lawyer's, and were invited to be present at the reading of it. I can remember it, as if it were yesterday. It was a grand, dramatic, burlesque, surprising scene, brought about by the posthumous revolt of that dead woman, by that cry for liberty, that claim from the depths of her tomb, of that martyred woman who had been crushed by our habits during her life, and, who, from her closed tomb, uttered a despairing appeal for independence.

"The man who thought that he was my father, a stout, ruddy-faced man, who gave everyone the idea of a butcher, and my brothers, two great fellows of twenty and twenty-two, were waiting quietly in their chairs. Monsieur de Bourneval, who had been invited to be present, came in and stood behind me. He was very pale, and bit his moustache, which was turning gray. No doubt he was prepared for what was going to happen, and the lawyer double-locked the door and began to read the will, after having opened the envelope, which was sealed with red wax, and whose contents he was ignorant of, in our presence."

My friend stopped suddenly and got up, and from his writing-table he took an old paper, unfolded it, kissed it, and then continued: "This is the will of my beloved mother:

"'I, the undersigned, Anne Catherine-Genevieve-Mathilde de Croixlure, the legitimate wife of Leopold-Joseph Goutran de Courcils, sound in body and mind, here express my last wishes.

"'I first of all ask God, and then my dear son René, to pardon me for the act I am about to commit. I believe that my child's heart is great enough to understand me, and to forgive me. I have suffered my whole life long. I was married out of calculation, then despised, misunderstood, oppressed and constantly deceived by my husband.

"'I forgive him, but I owe him nothing.

"'My eldest sons never loved me, never spoilt me, scarcely treated me as a mother, but during my whole life I was everything that I ought to have been, and I owe them nothing more after my death. The ties of blood cannot exist without daily and constant affection. An ungrateful son is less than a stranger; he is a culprit, for he has no right to be indifferent towards his mother.

"'I have always trembled before men, before their unjust laws, their inhuman customs, their shameful prejudices. Before God, I have no longer any fear. Dead, I fling aside disgraceful hypocrisy; I dare to speak my thoughts, and to avow and to sign the secret of my heart.

"'I therefore leave that part of my fortune of which the law allows me to dispose, as a deposit with my dear lover Pierre-Gennes-Simon de Bourneval, to revert afterwards to our dear son, René.

"'(This wish is, moreover, formulated more precisely in a notarial deed).

"'And I declare before the Supreme Judge who hears me, that I should have cursed heaven and my own existence, if I had not met my lover's deep, devoted, tender, unshaken affection, if I had not felt in his arms that the Creator made His creatures to love, sustain and console each other, and to weep together in the hours of sadness.

"'Monsieur de Courcils is the father of my two eldest sons; René alone owes his life to Monsieur de Bourneval. I pray to the Master of men and of their destinies, to place father and son above social prejudices, to make them love each other until they die, and to love me also in my coffin.

"'These are my last thoughts, and my last wish.

"'MATHILDE DE CROIXLUCE.'"

"'Monsieur de Courcils had arisen and he cried:

"'It is the will of a mad woman.'

"Then Monsieur de Bourneval stepped forward and said in a loud and penetrating voice: 'I, Simon de Bourneval, solemnly declare that this writing contains nothing but the strict truth, and I am ready to prove it by letters which I possess.'

"On hearing that, Monsieur de Courcils went up to him, and I thought they were going to collar each other. There they stood, both of them tall, one stout and the other thin, both trembling. My mother's husband stammered out: 'You are a worthless wretch!' And the other replied in a loud, dry voice: 'We will meet somewhere else, monsieur. I should have already slapped your ugly face, and challenged you a long time ago, if I had not, before everything else, thought of the peace of mind of that poor woman whom you made suffer so much during her lifetime.'

"Then, turning to me, he said: 'You are my son; will you come with me? I have no right to take you away, but I shall assume it, if you will kindly come with me.' I shook his hand without replying, and we went out together; I was certainly three parts mad.

"Two days later Monsieur de Bourneval killed Monsieur de Courcils in a duel. My brothers, fearing some terrible scandal, held their tongues, and I offered them, and they accepted, half the fortune which my mother had left me. I took my real father's name, renouncing that which the law gave me, but which was not really mine. Monsieur de Bourneval died three years afterwards, and I have not consoled myself yet."

He rose from his chair, walked up and down the room, and, standing in front of me, he said:

"Well, I say that my mother's will was one of the most beautiful and loyal, as well as one of the grandest acts that a woman could perform. Do you not think so?"

I gave him both my hands:

"Most certainly I do, my friend."

A COUNTRY EXCURSION

For five months they had been talking of going to lunch at some country restaurant in the neighborhood of Paris, on Madame Dufour's birthday, and as they were looking forward very impatiently to the outing, they had got up very early that morning. Monsieur Dufour had borrowed the milkman's tilted cart, and drove himself. It was a very tidy, two-wheeled conveyance, with a hood, and in it the wife, resplendent in a wonderful, sherry-colored, silk dress, sat by the side of her husband.

The old grandmother and a girl were accommodated with two chairs, and a boy with yellow hair was lying at the bottom of the trap, of whom however, nothing was to be seen except his head.

When they got to the bridge of Neuilly, Monsieur Dufour said: "Here we are in the country at last!" and at that signal, his wife had grown sentimental about the beauties of nature. When they got to the cross roads at Courbevoie, they were seized with admiration for the distant horizon down there; on the right, was the spire of Argenteuil church, and above it rose the hills of Sannois, and the mill of Orgemont, while on the left, the aqueduct of Marly stood out against the clear morning sky, and in the distance they could see the terrace of Saint-Germain; and opposite to them, at the end of a low chain of hills, the new fort of Cormeilles. Quite in the distance, a very long way off, beyond the plains and villages, one could see the somber green of the forests.

The sun was beginning to shine in their faces, the dust got into their eyes, and on either side of the road there stretched an interminable tract of bare, ugly country which smelt unpleasantly. One might have thought that it had been ravaged by the pestilence, which had even attacked the buildings, for skeletons of dilapidated and deserted houses, or small cottages, which were left in an unfinished state, as the contractors had not been paid, reared their four roofless walls on each side.

Here and there tall factory chimneys rose up from the barren soil; the only vegetation on that putrid land, where the spring breezes wafted an odor of petroleum and shist, which was mingled with another smell, that was even still less agreeable. At last, however, they crossed the Seine a second time, and it was delightful on the bridge. The river sparkled in the sun, and they had a feeling of quiet satisfaction and enjoyment, in drinking in the purer air, that was not impregnated by the black smoke of factories, nor by the miasma from the deposits of night soil. A man whom they met, told them that the name of the place was Bézons, and so Monsieur Dufour pulled up, and read the attractive announcement outside an eating-house: Restaurant Poulin, stews and fried fish, private rooms, arbors and swings.

"Well! Madame Dufour, will this suit you? Will you make up your mind at last?"

She read the announcement in her turn, and then looked at the house for a time.

It was a white, country inn, built by the road side, and through the open door she could see the bright zinc of the counter, at which two workmen, out for the day, were sitting. At last she made up her mind, and said:

"Yes, this will do; and, besides, there is a view."

So they drove into a large yard with trees in it, behind the inn, which was only separated from the river by the towing-path, and got out. The husband sprang out first, and then held out his arms for his wife, and as the step was very high, Madame Dufour, in order to reach him, had to show the lower part of her limbs, whose former slenderness had disappeared in fat, the Monsieur Dufour, who was already getting excited by the country air, pinched her calf, and then taking her in his arms, he set her onto the ground, as if she had been some enormous bundle. She shook the dust out of the silk dress, and then looked round, to see in what sort of a place she was.