The Marquise of O and Other Stories (5 page)

It is at this point that Kleist's very characteristic variation on the Hyginus story begins. Three further motifs are introduced, all of them associated with the realm of the sinister and the occult. First, that of the
Doppelgänger
: Nicolo discovers that the figure in the portrait exactly resembles himself. Secondly, while idly toying one day with the six letters of a child's alphabet that compose his name, he finds that it is an anagram of the name ‘Colino' which he has heard Elvira murmur to the portrait. In traditional magical lore, anagrams and similar verbal devices have since antiquity played a well-recognized part, as have also such divinatory procedures as throwing down letters of the alphabet at random; this in fact happens in Ira Levin's macabre novel about satanism in present-day New York,
Rosemary's Baby
(1967), in which the heroine discovers by throwing down some letters that the name of her neighbour Roman Castavet is an anagram of the name of a well-known diabolist, Stevan Marcato. The third and crucial additional motif is that of the ‘uncanny' mingling or confusion of the inanimate with the animate, the dead with the living, the portrait with the model. (There are many parallels to this idea, both before and after Kleist; Hoffmann, for instance, was attracted
by the theme of automata, which he uses notably in
The Sandman
.) The impersonation by the evil Nicolo of his polar opposite, the virtuous and noble Colino, is in fact the central
pointe
and dramatic climax of this
Novelle
. Kleist skilfully prepares it and builds up to it, just as he does to the central incident with the dog in
The Beggarwoman of Locarno
. Nicolo discovers his affinity with the portrait and the connexion between the names; he remembers that Elvira fainted when, after a masked ball, by coincidence she saw him wearing the same costume as the Genoese knight of the portrait; and he notes how disturbed she becomes when he deliberately confronts her with the six letters rearranged to form the name ‘Colino'. He also discovers Colino's identity and the mystery of his adoptive mother's perpetual infatuation with a dead man. The impersonation scene itself, in which he exploits all these discoveries, has a dramatic force not unlike that of the crucial confrontation in Oscar Wilde's story,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, between the beautiful but profoundly corrupted Dorian and his
alter ego
or real self, the mysterious life-sized portrait which, hidden in an attic, has aged and grown foul, while he as the world knows him has retained the innocent youthfulness painted long ago by a man who saw him with the vision of a lover. (It may be noted that at the very beginning of
The Foundling
Nicolo is described as beautiful in a way that is ‘strangely statuesque' –
eigentümlich starr
, literally ‘rigid', a phrase suggesting some kind of portrait or mask.)

The remainder of Kleist's story simply works out the logical consequences of this scene, the remorseless conclusion of a world turned mad and satanic: the death of the horrified Elvira after her secret fantasy has become a ghostly reality, the dreadful murder of Nicolo by Piachi, the transformation of this kindly old man into an obsessed avenger literally craving for Hell where, like Dante's Ugolino, he may eternally torment this emissary of nothingness who
has taken everything from him – his son, his property, his wife, his life, and his soul. We never discover who ‘Nicolo' is, nor by what sinister coincidence or for what other reason he is the double of ‘Colino' and is called by an inversion, as it were, of his name. The polarity which can lie within one and the same character, that of Kohlhaas, for instance, or of the angel-devil Count F—, is here externalized into two persons, each the opposite of the other. This ‘good-evil' version of the
Doppelgänger
theme is also used by Hoffmann in his novel
The Devil's Elixir;
R. L. Stevenson's
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
is a later variant of it, and numerous others could no doubt be found.

In the last story,
The Duel
, as in the first,
The Earthquake in Chile
, God himself acts ambiguously.
The Duel
has a medieval setting and is based partly on a chronicle by Froissart and partly on an episode from Cervantes' romance
Persiles y Sigismunda
. What seems to have interested Kleist was the idea he found in his source material that the procedure of trial by ordeal (here ordeal by single combat), which according to medieval belief was the ultimate and infallible method of discovering the truth when ordinary evidence could not establish it, might at times yield a misleading, seemingly incorrect answer. This theme, as incorporated in the apparent defeat of the heroine's champion by Jakob Rotbart, is accordingly the dramatic
pointe
of
The Duel
, just as Toni's binding up her sleeping lover is that of
The Betrothal in Santo Domingo
, the behaviour of the dog that of
The Beggarwoman of Locarno
, the portrait scene that of
The Foundling
, and the unearthly performance of the Mass that of
St Cecilia
. It has been objected that Kleist over-complicates the structure of
The Duel
by making the involved preliminary story of the murder of Duke Wilhelm, which was not in his sources, precede the main story of Littegarde and her champion Friedrich von Trota; but he must have felt this to be artistically necessary if the central enigma were to be convincingly and pointedly set up. The
essential situation, as in
The Broken Pitcher, Amphitryon
, and
The Marquise of O
—, is that of the apparently chaste woman suspected of unchastity on the basis of seemingly damning evidence. The case against Littegarde would be weakened if Count Rotbart were obviously a scoundrel, but he is regarded as an honourable man by many and it is only because he is on trial for his life on a charge of murder that, as an alibi, he can seem justified in making (with a due show of gentlemanly reluctance) his disclosure that the night on which the murder was committed had been spent by him in Littegarde's bedroom. Moreover, just as in
Amphitryon
Alcmene is bafflingly confronted with a golden diadem which must appear to be a love-gift from someone other than her husband, the Count is able to produce a ring which he declares Littegarde had given him on that night. (It may also be noted that both Littegarde and the Marquise of O— are widows, which of course makes their alleged misconduct more difficult to disprove.) But in Littegarde's case there are not only worldly presumptions and specific evidence against her: proof seems to become absolute at the point where her champion, having appealed to the irrefutable judgement of God, is apparently defeated by her supposed paramour. Not surprisingly, she here undergoes a kind of mental crisis and ceases to believe even in her own innocence. Nowhere in Kleist's work is the discrepancy between reality and appearance so sharply polarized. Littegarde's despairing confession to Friedrich von Trota in the prison scene puts Trota to the ultimate test of the lover's faith in his beloved, a subtle personal parallel to the public trial by ordeal he has undergone already. At first, overwhelmed by the monstrous contradiction between what he unquestioningly believed to be true and what now presents itself as true, that faith momentarily collapses and he faints, as the Marquise fainted when the midwife declared her to be pregnant, or Elvira when ‘Colino' confronted her. But he recovers, and passes the test in which Gustav von der Ried had failed. He utters
the words which sum up Kleist's whole conviction of the limitations of rationalism, urging Littegarde to hold fast at all costs to her inner intuitive feeling that she is innocent, notwithstanding all the indications to the contrary and notwithstanding even the apparently contrary divine pronouncement. This point of crisis and positive faith having been reached, Kleist (or God) can proceed to the vindication of Littegarde on the basis of evidence: the mystery is not an irrational one at all; the narrator has the key to it all the time, as in
The Marquise of O
—, and therefore, like that story,
The Duel
does not end tragically. The difference between the two stories is that in
The Duel
the solution is not shared all along with the reader, to whom the narrative therefore presents itself with tension and tragic potential. Unlike Count F—, even Rotbart himself does not know the real explanation of what has happened, and nor does anyone else until the very end when it is discovered accidentally – or rather (in terms of the story's medieval Christian frame of reference) revealed by God in his own time. On the night of the murder the Count has in fact been received at Auerstein Castle, but not by Littegarde as he fondly imagines; her maid-in-waiting, an abandoned mistress of Rotbart, has deceived the latter by impersonating Littegarde, in whom she knows him to be interested, has stolen her lady's ring and given it to him, taking him in the darkness of the night to a sumptuous bedroom in a deserted wing of the castle. And in fact Rotbart has nevertheless been responsible for the murder of Duke Wilhelm, having employed a henchman to shoot him down; but in stating that he was with Littegarde on the night in question he has been in good faith. The real and paradoxical outcome of the duel therefore turns out to be entirely appropriate: Trota recovers from his seemingly mortal wound, while Rotbart dies slowly and horribly from his slight scratch, which has turned gangrenous. Informed of the maid Rosalie's spiteful deception of him, he makes as he dies a public
confession which at the last moment saves the lovers from being burnt at the stake for blasphemy, and the Emperor orders a modification of the statute about trial by ordeal: a clause is to be inserted indicating that this procedure will reveal the truth immediately ‘if it be God's will'. If it is not his will, then presumably he will reveal it later. But does Kleist here imply that this later revelation will always, as in the case of Friedrich and Littegarde, be in time to prevent a miscarriage of temporal justice? Perhaps not; but if not, then ironically enough the whole ordeal procedure ceases to be reliable, and the conclusion of
The Duel
cannot be said to be unequivocally optimistic. In the last resort the inscrutability of God's ways must be accepted; he cannot be magically compelled to answer questions. At best (as Kleist had suggested in 1806) the world is governed by a being who is ‘not understood'; and the presumptuous claim to understand him can be raised by those who are guided by nothing more than their own cruel passions, with the terrible consequences which
The Earthquake in Chile
makes manifest.

The world of all these stories is an unpredictable one, a world of dislocated causality on which inexplicable factors intrude and in which sanity is poised on the brink of destruction. They are the work of a rationalist tormented by his loss of faith in Reason and desperately searching for certainty, for an order which is not
‘gebrechlich'
. In Kleisf's life this search could only fail; the only imposable order was that of his art, an order of words, the strange patterns of his three or four dramatic masterpieces, the electrifying articulated structures of his narrative prose. The qualities of the latter which have made it the subject of much intensive stylistic scrutiny are of course the very qualities to which a translator cannot hope to do justice. He must merely seek to achieve a compromise that will suggest something of the simultaneous complexity and elegance of the original, while respecting the limits to which English
syntax can reasonably be pushed. We have felt that a new attempt was justified: Martin Greenberg's version (New York, 1960; Faber and Faber 1963; now out of print) was marred by too many errors of comprehension and taste, which we have tried to avoid, while remaining in good measure indebted to its frequent felicities.

A happy chance had enabled her lover to resume the liaison in this very place, and one quiet night the convent garden became the scene of his joy's consummation. On the day of Corpus Christi, the solemn procession of the nuns, with the novices following them, was just beginning when, as the bells pealed out, the unhappy Josefa collapsed on the cathedral steps in the pangs of childbirth.

This incident caused an extraordinary public stir; without any regard for her condition the young sinner was at once imprisoned, and her confinement was scarcely over when by the Archbishop's command she was put on trial with the utmost rigour. The scandal was talked of in the city with so much anger and the whole convent in which it had taken place was criticized on all sides with such harshness that neither the intercession of the Asterón family, nor even the
wishes of the Abbess herself, who had conceived an affection for the young girl on account of her otherwise irreproachable conduct, could mitigate the strict penalty to which she was subject by conventual law. All that could be done was that the Viceroy commuted her sentence from death at the stake to death by beheading, a decision which greatly outraged the matrons and virgins of Santiago.

In the streets through which the culprit was to be led to her execution the windows were rented, the roofs of the houses were partly dismantled, and the pious daughters of the city invited their female friends to witness with them, in sisterly companionship, this spectacle about to be offered to divine vengeance.

Jerónimo, who in the meantime had also been imprisoned, went almost out of his mind when he was informed of this appalling turn of events. In vain he pondered plans of rescue: wherever the wings of his most reckless imaginings carried him, bolts and walls were in his way; when he attempted to file through the window bars this was discovered, and merely led to his being locked up still more strictly. He fell on his knees before an image of the Holy Mother of God and prayed to her with infinite fervour, convinced that she alone could save them now.

Yet the fearful day came, and with it an inward certainty of the utter hopelessness of his position. The bells that accompanied Josefa's passage to the place of execution began to toll, and despair overcame him. Hating his life, he resolved to put an end to it by means of a length of rope which by chance had been left in his cell. He was standing by one of the walls under a pillar, as already related, holding the rope that would release him from this miserable world, and was in the very act of fastening it to an iron bracket attached to the cornice, when suddenly, with a crash as if the very firmament had shattered, the greater part of the city collapsed, burying every living thing beneath its ruins. Jerónimo Rugera stood rigid with horror; and as if every
thought had been obliterated from his mind, he now clung to the pillar on which he had wanted to die, and tried to stop himself falling. The ground was heaving under his feet, great cracks appeared in the walls all round him, the whole edifice toppled towards the street and would have crashed down into it had not its slow fall been met by that of the house opposite, and only the arch thus formed by chance prevented its complete destruction. Trembling, his hair on end, his knees nearly giving way, Jerónimo slid down the steeply sloping floor to the gap that had been torn through the front wall of his prison as the two buildings collided.

He was scarcely outside when a second tremor completely demolished the already subsiding street. Panic-stricken, with no idea of how to save himself from this general doom, he ran on over wreckage and fallen timber towards one of the nearest city gates, while death assailed him from all directions. Here another house caved in, scattering its debris far and wide and driving him into a side street; here flames, flashing through clouds of smoke, were licking out of every gable and chased him in terror into another; here the Mapocho river, overflowing its banks, rolled roaring towards him and forced him into a third. Here lay a heap of corpses, there a voice still moaned under the rubble, here people were screaming on burning house-tops, there men and animals were struggling in the floodwater, here a brave rescuer tried to help and there stood another man, pale as death, speechlessly extending his trembling hands to heaven. When Jerónimo had reached the gate and climbed a hill beyond it, he fell down at the top in a dead faint.

He had probably lain there quite unconscious for about a quarter of an hour when he finally recovered his senses and half raised himself up, his back turned to the city. He felt his forehead and his chest, not knowing what to make of his condition, and an unspeakable feeling of bliss came over him as a westerly breeze from the sea fanned his returning
life and his eyes wandered in all directions over the fertile surroundings of Santiago. Only the sight of crowds of distraught people everywhere troubled him; he did not understand what could have brought them and him to this place, and only when he turned and saw the city levelled to the ground behind him did he remember the terrifying moments he had just experienced. He bowed his forehead to the very ground as he thanked God for his miraculous escape; and as if this one appalling memory, stamping itself on his mind, had erased all others, he wept with rapture to find that the blessing of life, in all its wealth and variety, was still his to enjoy.

But a moment later, noticing a ring on his finger, he suddenly also remembered Josefa, and with her his prison, the bells he had there heard tolling, and the moment that had preceded its collapse. Deep sorrow again filled his heart; he began to regret his prayer and to think with horror of the Being who rules above the clouds. He mixed with the people who, busy salvaging their possessions, were pouring out of all the city gates, and ventured a few diffident inquiries about Asterón's daughter and whether the sentence against her had been carried out; but there was no one who could give him detailed information. A woman carrying an enormous load of household goods on her shoulders, bent almost to the ground and with two small children clinging to her breast, said as she passed, as if she herself had witnessed it, that Josefa had been beheaded. Jerónimo turned away from her; and since he himself, on calculating the time, felt no doubt that the execution had taken place, he sat down in a lonely wood and abandoned himself entirely to his grief. He wished that the destructive fury of nature might unleash itself on him once more. He could not understand why he had escaped the death which his afflicted soul desired, when in those very moments, on all sides, it had of its own accord been offering him deliverance. He firmly resolved not to flinch if even now the oak trees should be
uprooted and their crests come crashing down upon him. Presently, when he had finishing weeping and in the midst of his hottest tears hope had come to him again, he stood up and began exploring the whole area. He visited every hill-top on which people had gathered; on every road along which fugitives were still streaming, he went to meet them; wherever he caught sight of a woman's dress fluttering in the wind, there with trembling feet he hastened : but never was the wearer his beloved Josefa. The sun was going down, and his hopes with it, when he reached the edge of a cliff and from there could look down into a wide valley to which only a few people had come. Not sure what to do, he passed quickly among the different groups and was about to turn back again when suddenly, beside a stream that flowed through the ravine, he noticed a young woman busy washing a child in its waters. And at this sight his heart leapt up: eager with expectation he ran down over the rocks, and with a cry of ‘Oh, holy Mother of God!' he recognized Josefa as on hearing his approach she shyly looked round. With what ecstasy they embraced, the unhappy pair, saved by a divine miracle!

On her way to her death, Josefa had already nearly reached the place of execution when suddenly the buildings had begun crashing down and scattered in all directions the procession that was leading her to the block. Her first terrified steps carried her towards the nearest gate of the town; but almost at once, regaining her presence of mind, she turned round and rushed back to the convent where she had left her helpless little son. She found the whole building already in flames, and the Abbess, who during those minutes which were to have been her last had promised to take care of her baby, was at the entrance crying out for help to rescue him. Josefa, undeterred by the smoke billowing towards her, dashed into the convent, which was already collapsing all round her and, as if protected by all the angels in heaven, emerged again uninjured at its gate, carrying her
child. She was just about to embrace the Abbess when the latter, who had clasped her hands in blessing over her, was ignominiously struck dead by a falling gable, together with nearly all her nuns. Josefa retreated trembling at this dreadful sight; she hastily closed the Abbess's eyes and fled, utterly terrified, to bring to safety her beloved boy whom heaven had restored to her again.

She had taken only a few steps when she found before her the mangled body of the Archbishop, which had just been dragged from under the wreckage of the cathedral. The Viceroy's palace had collapsed, the law court in which sentence had been passed on her was in flames, and in the place where her father's house had stood there was now a seething lake from which reddish vapours were rising. Josefa summoned up all her strength to sustain her, hardening herself against all these distressing sights, and walked on bravely from street to street with her recaptured treasure. She was already near the gate when she saw the prison in which Jerónimo had languished: it too was in ruins. She reeled at this sight and nearly fell down in a swoon at the street corner, but at that very moment a building, its foundations loosened by the tremors, crashed down behind her and drove her on, fortified again by terror. She kissed her child, dashed the tears from her eyes, and no longer heeding the horrors that surrounded her reached the gate. When she found herself in open country she soon realized that not everyone who had been inside a demolished building had necessarily been crushed beneath it.

At the next crossroads she paused and waited, wondering whether the person who, after her little Felipe, was dearest to her in the world, might yet appear. But since he did not come and more and more people thronged past, she continued on her way, and turned round again, and waited again; then turned aside, shedding many tears, into a dark pine-shaded valley to pray for his (as she believed) departed soul; and here in this valley she found him, her lover, and
with him such joy that the valley might have been the Garden of Eden.

All this, in a voice filled with emotion, she now told Jerónimo, and when she had finished, gave him the boy to kiss. Jerónimo, with all the inexpressible delight of fatherhood, took him and hugged him, and, when his unfamiliar face made the little one cry, kept caressing him till he was silent. In the meantime the loveliest of nights had fallen, wonderfully mild and fragrant, silvery and still, a night such as only a poet might dream of. Everywhere along the banks of the stream, in the glittering moonlight, people had settled and were preparing soft beds of moss and foliage on which to rest after so harrowing a day. And since these poor victims of the disaster were still lamenting, one the loss of his house, another that of his wife and child, and a third that of everything he had possessed, Jerónimo and Josefa slipped away into a denser part of the wood, not wanting to give offence to anyone by the secret exultation of their own hearts. They found a splendid pomegranate tree, its outspread branches heavy with scented fruit, and high on its crest the nightingale piped its voluptuous song. Here, with Jerónimo leaning against its trunk and covering them with his cloak, they sat down to rest, Josefa on his lap and Felipe on hers. The tree's shadow with its scattered points of light passed over them, and the moon was already fading in the glow of dawn before they slept. For there was no end to what they had to talk about, the convent garden, their prisons, and what they had suffered for each other's sake; and it moved them greatly to think how much misery had had to afflict the world in order to bring about their happiness.

They decided that as soon as the tremors had ceased they would go to La Concepción, for Josefa had an intimate friend there, and with a small sum of money she hoped to borrow from her they would be able to embark there for Spain, where Jerónimo's relatives on his mother's
side lived; there they could be happy for the rest of their days. Upon this thought, amid many kisses, they fell asleep.

When they woke, the sun was already well up in the sky, and they noticed not far from them several families busy making themselves some breakfast at a fire. Jerónimo was just wondering how he too could get some food for his child and its mother when a well-dressed young man, carrying an infant, approached Josefa and asked her politely whether she would be willing to feed at her breast for a while this poor little creature, whose mother was lying injured over there among the trees. Josefa was thrown into some embarrassment when she recognized him as an acquaintance; but when, misinterpreting her confusion, he continued: ‘It will only be for a few minutes, Doña Josefa, and this child has not been fed since the time of the disaster which overtook us all,' she said, ‘I had – a different reason for not replying, Don Fernando; in a terrible time like this no one can refuse to share whatever they may have.' So saying she took the little stranger, handing her own child to its father, and put it to her breast. Don Fernando was most grateful for this kindness and asked her to come with him to his own party, where breakfast was just being prepared at the fire. Josefa answered that she would accept the invitation with pleasure and, since Jerónimo also made no objection, she accompanied Don Fernando to his family, where his two sisters-in-law, whom she knew to be young ladies of excellent character, received her most warmly and affectionately.

Doña Elvira, Don Fernando's wife, was lying on the ground with her feet seriously injured, and when she saw her sickly little boy at Josefa's breast she drew the latter down towards her and kissed her lovingly. Don Pedro, Elvira's father, who was wounded in the shoulder, also nodded to her in the most friendly manner.