The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig (16 page)

At last evening came, but it was dismal here! Nothing but the coming of darkness, the disappearance of everything, the extinction of the light. Evening here was an end, whereas in Paris it had been the beginning of all pleasures. Here it let the night pour in, there it lit gilded candles in the royal halls, made the air sparkle in your eyes, kindled, warmed, intoxicated and inspired the heart. Here it only made you more anxious. She wandered from room to room: silence lurked in all of them, like a savage animal sated with all the years when no one had been here, and she feared it might leap on her. The floorboards groaned, the books creaked in their bindings as soon as you touched them; something in the spinet moaned in fright like a beaten child when she touched the keys and summoned up a tearful sound. Everything joined in the darkness to resist her, the intruder.

Then, shivering, she had lights lit all over the house. She tried to stay in one room, but she was constantly impelled to move on, she fled from room to room as if that would calm her. But everywhere she came up against the invisible wall of the silence that had ruled this place by right for years, and would not be dismissed. Even the lights seemed to feel it; they hissed quietly and wept hot drops of wax.

Seen from outside, however, the château shone brightly with its thirty sparkling windows, as if there were great festivities here. Groups of villagers stood outside, amazed and wondering aloud where so many people had suddenly come from. But the figure that they saw flitting like a shadow past first one window and then another was always the same: Madame de Prie, pacing desperately up and down like a wild beast in the prison of her inner solitude, looking through the window for something that never came.

On the third day she lost control of her impatience and it turned violent. The solitude oppressed her; she needed people, or at least
news of people, of the court, the natural home of her whole being with all its ramifications, of her friends, something to excite or merely touch her. She couldn’t wait for the messenger, and early in the morning she rode for three hours to meet him. It was raining, and there was a high wind; her hair, heavy with water, pulled her head back, and the wind blew rain in her face so hard that she saw nothing. Her freezing hands could hardly hold the reins. Finally she galloped back, had her wet clothes stripped off, and took refuge in bed again. She waited feverishly, clenching her teeth on the covers. Now she understood the Count of Belle-Isle’s menacing smile as he said that she would find so long a period of solitude hard to bear. And it had been only three days!

At last the courier came. She did not pretend any longer, but avidly tore the seal off the letter with her nails, like a starving man tearing the husk off a fruit. There was a great deal about the court in it: her eye ran down the lines in search of her name. Nothing, nothing. But one name did stand out like fire: her position as lady-in-waiting had been given to Madame de Calaincourt.

For a moment she trembled and felt quite weak. So it was not a case of fleeting disfavour but permanent exile: it was her death sentence, and she loved life. She leaped suddenly out of bed, feeling no shame in front of the courier, and half-naked, shaking with the cold, she wrote letter after letter with a wild craving. She abandoned her show of pride. She wrote to the King, although she knew he hated her; she promised in the humblest, most pitifully grovelling of terms never to try meddling in affairs of state again. She wrote to Marie Leszczynska, reminding her that she was Queen of France only through the agency of Madame de Prie; she wrote to the ministers, promising them money; she turned to her friends. She urged Voltaire, whom she had saved from the Bastille, to write an elegy on her departure from court and to read it aloud. She ordered her secretary to commission lampoons on her enemies and have them distributed in pamphlet form. She wrote twenty such letters with her fevered hand, all begging for just one thing:
Paris, the world, salvation from this solitude. They were no longer letters but screams. Then she opened a casket, gave the courier a handful of gold pieces, told him that even if he rode his horse to death he must be in Paris tonight. Only here had she learned what an hour really meant. Startled, he was going to thank her, but she drove him out.

Then she sought shelter in bed again. She was freezing. A harsh cough shook her thin frame. She lay staring ahead, always waiting for the clock on the mantelpiece to reach the hour and strike at last. But the hours were stubborn, they were not to be hounded with curses, with pleas, with gold, they went sleepily around. The servants came, she sent them all out, she would show no one her despair, she did not want food, or words, she wanted nothing from anyone. The rain fell incessantly outside, and she was as chilly as if she were standing out there shivering like the shrubs with their arms helplessly outstretched. One question went up and down in her mind like the swing of a pendulum: why, why, why, why? Why had God done this to her? Had she sinned so much?

She tugged at the bell-pull and told them to fetch the local priest. It soothed her to think that someone lived here to whom she could talk and confide her fears.

The priest did not delay, more particularly as he had been told that madame was ill. She could not help smiling when he came in, thinking of her abbé in Paris with his fine and delicate hands, the bright glance that rested on her almost tenderly, his courtly conversation which made you quite forget that he was taking confession. The abbé of Courbépine was portly and broad-shouldered, and his boots creaked as he trudged through the doorway. Everything about him was red: his plump hands, his face, weathered by the wind, his big ears, but there was something friendly about him as he offered her his great paw in greeting and sat down in an armchair. The horror in the room seemed to fear his weighty presence and cringed in a corner: filled by his loud voice the room appeared warmer, livelier, and it seemed to Madame de Prie that she breathed more easily
now that he was here. He did not know exactly why he had been summoned, and made clumsy conversation, spoke of his parish work, and Paris which he knew only by hearsay, he demonstrated his scholarship, spoke of Descartes and the dangerous works of the sieur de Montaigne. She put in a word here and there, abstractedly; her thoughts were buzzing like a swarm of flies, she just wanted to listen, to hear a human voice, to raise it like a dam holding back the sea of loneliness that threatened to drown her. When, afraid he was disturbing her he was about to stop talking, she encouraged him with ardent kindness which was really nothing but fear. She promised to call on the reverend gentleman, invited him to visit her often; the seductive side of her nature, which had cast such a spell in Paris, emerged extravagantly from her dreamy silence. And the abbé stayed until it was dark.

But as soon as he left she felt as if the weight of the silence were descending on her twice as heavily as before, as if she alone had to hold up the high ceiling, she alone must keep back the advancing darkness. She had never known how much a single human being can mean to another, because she had never been lonely before. She had never thought more of other people than of air, and one does not feel the air, but now that solitude was choking her, only now did she realise how much she needed them, recognising how much they meant to her even when they deceived and told lies, how she herself drew everything from their presence, their easy manners, their confidence and cheerfulness. She had been immersed for decades in the tide of society, never knowing that it nourished and bore her up, but now, stranded like a fish on the beach of solitude, she flinched in despair and convulsive pain. She was freezing and feverishly hot at once. She felt her own body, was startled to find how cold it was; all its sensuous warmth seemed to have died away, her blood surged sluggishly through her veins like gelatine, she felt as if she were lying here in the silence inside the coffin of her own corpse. And suddenly a hot sob of despair tore through her. Alarmed at first, she tried to suppress it, but there was no one here,
here she did not have to dissimulate, she was alone with herself for the first time. And she willingly abandoned herself to the sweet pain of feeling hot tears run down her icy cheeks, while she heard her own sobbing in the terrible silence.

She made haste to return the abbé’s visit. The house was deserted, no letters came—she herself knew that no one in Paris had much time for petitioners, and she had to do something, anything, even if it was just playing backgammon, or talking, or simply finding out how someone else talked. Somehow she must defy the tedium advancing ever more menacingly and murderously on her heart. She hurried through the village; she felt nauseated by everything that partook in any way of the name of Courbépine and reminded her of her exile. The abbé’s little house lay at the end of the village street, surrounded by green countryside. It was not much higher than a barn, but flowers framed the tiny windows and their tangled foliage hung down over the door, so that she had to bend down to avoid being caught in their fragrant toils.

The abbé was not alone. With him at his desk sat a young man whom, in great confusion at the honour of such a visit, he introduced as his nephew. The abbé was preparing him for his studies, although he was not to be a priest—a vocation for which so much must be given up! This was meant as a gallant jest. Madame de Prie smiled, not so much at the rather clumsy compliment as at the amusing embarrassment of the young man, who blushed red and didn’t know where to look. He was a tall country fellow with a bony, red-cheeked face, yellow hair and a rather artless expression: he seemed clumsy and brutish with his awkward limbs, but at the moment his extreme respect for her kept his boorishness within bounds and made him look childishly helpless. He scarcely dared to answer her questions, stuttered and stammered, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again, and Madame de Prie, enchanted
by his embarrassment, asked him question after question—it did her good to find someone who was confused and small in her presence again, who felt that he was a supplicant, subservient to her. The abbé spoke for him, praised his passion for the noble vocation of scholarship, his other good qualities, and told her it was the boy’s great wish to be able to complete his studies at the university in Paris. He himself, to be sure, was poor and could not help his nephew much, the boy also lacked the patronage that alone smoothed the path to high office, and he pressingly recommended him to her favour. He knew that she was all-powerful at court; a single word would suffice to make the young student’s boldest dreams come true.

Madame de Prie smiled bitterly into the darkness: so she was supposed to be all-powerful at court, and couldn’t even compel anyone to answer a single letter or grant a single request. Yet it was good to feel that no one here knew of her helplessness and her fall from grace. Even the semblance of power warmed her heart now. She controlled herself: yes, she would certainly recommend the young man, who from what so estimable an advocate as the abbé said of him must surely be worthy of every favour. She asked him to come and talk to her tomorrow so that she could assess his qualities. She would recommend him at court, she said, she would give him a letter of introduction to her friend the Queen and the members of the Academy (reminding herself, as she said so, that not one of them had sent a single line in reply to her letters).

The old abbé was quivering with delight, and tears ran down his fat cheeks. He kissed her hands, wandered around the room as if drunk, while the young fellow stood there with a dazed expression, unable to utter a word. When Madame de Prie decided to leave he did not budge, but stayed rooted to the spot, until the abbé surreptitiously indicated, with a vigorous gesture, that he should escort his benefactress back to the château. He walked beside her, stammering out thanks, and tangling his words up whenever she looked at him. It made her feel quite cheerful. For the first time she
felt the old relish, mingled with slight contempt, of seeing a human being powerless before her. It revived the desire to toy with others which had become a necessity of life to her during her years of power. He stopped at the gateway of the château, bowed clumsily and strode away with his stiff, rustic gait, hardly giving her time to remind him to come and see her tomorrow.

She watched him go, smiling to herself. He was clumsy and naïve, but all the same he was alive and passionate, not dead like everything else around her. He was fire, and she was freezing. Her body was starved here too, accustomed as it was to caresses and embraces; her eyes, if they were to have any lively brilliance, must reflect the sparkling desires of the young that came her way daily in Paris. She watched for a long time as he walked away: this could be a toy, admittedly made of hard wood, rough-hewn and artless, but still a toy to help her pass the time.

Next morning the young man called. Madame de Prie, who weary as she was with inactivity and discontent did not usually rise until late in the afternoon, decided to receive the caller in her bed. First she had herself carefully adorned by her lady’s maid, with a little red colour on her lips, which were getting paler and paler. Then she told the maid to admit her visitor.

The door slowly creaked open. Hesitantly and very awkwardly, the young man made his way in. He had put on his best garments, which nonetheless were the Sunday clothes of a rustic, and smelled rather too strongly of various greasy ointments. His gaze wandered searchingly from the floor to the ceiling of the darkened room, and he seemed relieved to find no one there, until an encouraging greeting came from beneath the pink cloud of the canopy over the bed. He started, for he either did not know or had forgotten that great ladies in Paris received visitors at their
levée
. He made some kind of backwards movement, as if he had stepped into deep
water, and his cheeks flushed a deep red, betraying embarrassment which she enjoyed to the full and which charmed her. In honeyed tones, she invited him to come closer. It amused her to treat him with the utmost civility.