Honore de Balzac

To Monsieur de Margone.

In grateful remembrance, from his guest at the Chateau de Sache.

De Balzac.

The autumn of the year 1803 was one of the finest in the early part of
that period of the present century which we now call "Empire." Rain had
refreshed the earth during the month of October, so that the trees were
still green and leafy in November. The French people were beginning to
put faith in a secret understanding between the skies and Bonaparte,
then declared Consul for life,—a belief in which that man owes part of
his prestige; strange to say, on the day the sun failed him, in 1812,
his luck ceased!

About four in the afternoon on the fifteenth of November, 1803, the sun
was casting what looked like scarlet dust upon the venerable tops of
four rows of elms in a long baronial avenue, and sparkling on the sand
and grassy places of an immense
rond-point
, such as we often see in
the country where land is cheap enough to be sacrificed to ornament. The
air was so pure, the atmosphere so tempered that a family was sitting
out of doors as if it were summer. A man dressed in a hunting-jacket of
green drilling with green buttons, and breeches of the same stuff, and
wearing shoes with thin soles and gaiters to the knee, was cleaning a
gun with the minute care a skilful huntsman gives to the work in his
leisure hours. This man had neither game nor game-bag, nor any of the
accoutrements which denote either departure for a hunt or the return
from it; and two women sitting near were looking at him as though beset
by a terror they could ill-conceal. Any one observing the scene taking
place in this leafy nook would have shuddered, as the old mother-in-law
and the wife of the man we speak of were now shuddering. A huntsman does
not take such minute precautions with his weapon to kill small game,
neither does he use, in the department of the Aube, a heavy rifled
carbine.

"Shall you kill a roe-buck, Michu?" said his handsome young wife, trying
to assume a laughing air.

Before replying, Michu looked at his dog, which had been lying in the
sun, its paws stretched out and its nose on its paws, in the charming
attitude of a trained hunter. The animal had just raised its head and
was snuffing the air, first down the avenue nearly a mile long which
stretched before them, and then up the cross road where it entered the
rond-point
to the left.

"No," answered Michu, "but a brute I do not wish to miss, a lynx."

The dog, a magnificent spaniel, white with brown spots, growled.

"Hah!" said Michu, talking to himself, "spies! the country swarms with
them."

Madame Michu looked appealingly to heaven. A beautiful fair woman
with blue eyes, composed and thoughtful in expression and made like an
antique statue, she seemed to be a prey to some dark and bitter grief.
The husband's appearance may explain to a certain extent the evident
fear of the two women. The laws of physiognomy are precise, not only in
their application to character, but also in relation to the destinies
of life. There is such a thing as prophetic physiognomy. If it were
possible (and such a vital statistic would be of value to society) to
obtain exact likenesses of those who perish on the scaffold, the science
of Lavatar and also that of Gall would prove unmistakably that the heads
of all such persons, even those who are innocent, show prophetic signs.
Yes, fate sets its mark on the faces of those who are doomed to die a
violent death of any kind. Now, this sign, this seal, visible to the eye
of an observer, was imprinted on the expressive face of the man with the
rifled carbine. Short and stout, abrupt and active in his motions as a
monkey, though calm in temperament, Michu had a white face injected
with blood, and features set close together like those of a Tartar,—a
likeness to which his crinkled red hair conveyed a sinister expression.
His eyes, clear and yellow as those of a tiger, showed depths behind
them in which the glance of whoever examined the man might lose itself
and never find either warmth or motion. Fixed, luminous, and rigid,
those eyes terrified whoever gazed into them. The singular contrast
between the immobility of the eyes and the activity of the body
increased the chilling impression conveyed by a first sight of Michu.
Action, always prompt in this man, was the outcome of a single thought;
just as the life of animals is, without reflection, the outcome of
instinct. Since 1793 he had trimmed his red beard to the shape of a fan.
Even if he had not been (as he was during the Terror) president of a
club of Jacobins, this peculiarity of his head would in itself have
made him terrible to behold. His Socratic face with its blunt nose was
surmounted by a fine forehead, so projecting, however, that it overhung
the rest of the features. The ears, well detached from the head, had the
sort of mobility which we find in those of wild animals, which are ever
on the qui-vive. The mouth, half-open, as the custom usually is among
country-people, showed teeth that were strong and white as almonds, but
irregular. Gleaming red whiskers framed this face, which was white and
yet mottled in spots. The hair, cropped close in front and allowed to
grow long at the sides and on the back of the head, brought into relief,
by its savage redness, all the strange and fateful peculiarities of this
singular face. The neck which was short and thick, seemed to tempt the
axe.

At this moment the sunbeams, falling in long lines athwart the group,
lighted up the three heads at which the dog from time to time glanced
up. The spot on which this scene took place was magnificently fine. The
rond-point
is at the entrance of the park of Gondreville, one of the
finest estates in France, and by far the finest in the departments of
the Aube; it boasts of long avenues of elms, a castle built from designs
by Mansart, a park of fifteen hundred acres enclosed by a stone wall,
nine large farms, a forest, mills, and meadows. This almost regal
property belonged before the Revolution to the family of Simeuse.
Ximeuse was a feudal estate in Lorraine; the name was pronounced
Simeuse, and in course of time it came to be written as pronounced.

The great fortune of the Simeuse family, adherents of the House of
Burgundy, dates from the time when the Guises were in conflict with
the Valois. Richelieu first, and afterwards Louis XIV. remembered their
devotion to the factious house of Lorraine, and rebuffed them. Then
the Marquis de Simeuse, an old Burgundian, old Guiser, old leaguer, old
frondeur
(he inherited the four great rancors of the nobility against
royalty), came to live at Cinq-Cygne. The former courtier, rejected at
the Louvre, married the widow of the Comte de Cinq-Cygne, younger branch
of the famous family of Chargeboeuf, one of the most illustrious names
in Champagne, and now as celebrated and opulent as the elder. The
marquis, among the richest men of his day, instead of wasting his
substance at court, built the chateau of Gondreville, enlarged the
estate by the purchase of others, and united the several domains, solely
for the purposes of a hunting-ground. He also built the Simeuse mansion
at Troyes, not far from that of the Cinq-Cygnes. These two old houses
and the bishop's palace were long the only stone mansions at Troyes. The
marquis sold Simeuse to the Duc de Lorraine. His son wasted the father's
savings and some part of his great fortune under the reign of Louis
XV., but he subsequently entered the navy, became a vice-admiral, and
redeemed the follies of his youth by brilliant services. The Marquis
de Simeuse, son of this naval worthy, perished with his wife on the
scaffold at Troyes, leaving twin sons, who emigrated and were, at the
time our history opens, still in foreign parts following the fortunes of
the house of Conde.

The
rond-point
was the scene of the meet in the time of the
"Grand Marquis"—a name given in the family to the Simeuse who built
Gondreville. Since 1789 Michu lived in the hunting lodge at the entrance
to the park, built in the reign of Louis XIV., and called the pavilion
of Cinq-Cygne. The village of Cinq-Cygne is at the end of the forest of
Nodesme (a corruption of Notre-Dame) which was reached through the fine
avenue of four rows of elms where Michu's dog was now suspecting spies.
After the death of the Grand Marquis this pavilion fell into disuse. The
vice-admiral preferred the court and the sea to Champagne, and his son
gave the dilapidated building to Michu for a dwelling.

This noble structure is of brick, with vermiculated stone-work at the
angles and on the casings of the doors and windows. On either side is
a gateway of finely wrought iron, eaten with rust and connected by a
railing, beyond which is a wide and deep ha-ha, full of vigorous trees,
its parapets bristling with iron arabesques, the innumerable sharp
points of which are a warning to evil-doers.

The park walls begin on each side of the circumference of the
rond-point
; on the one hand the fine semi-circle is defined by slopes
planted with elms; on the other, within the park, a corresponding
half-circle is formed by groups of rare trees. The pavilion, therefore,
stands at the centre of this round open space, which extends before it
and behind it in the shape of two horseshoes. Michu had turned the rooms
on the lower floor into a stable, a kitchen, and a wood-shed. The only
trace remaining of their ancient splendor was an antechamber paved with
marble in squares of black and white, which was entered on the park side
through a door with small leaded panes, such as might still be seen at
Versailles before Louis-Philippe turned that Chateau into an asylum
for the glories of France. The pavilion is divided inside by an old
staircase of worm-eaten wood, full of character, which leads to the
first story. Above that is an immense garret. This venerable edifice
is covered by one of those vast roofs with four sides, a ridgepole
decorated with leaden ornaments, and a round projecting window on each
side, such as Mansart very justly delighted in; for in France, the
Italian attics and flat roofs are a folly against which our climate
protests. Michu kept his fodder in this garret. That portion of the park
which surrounds the old pavilion is English in style. A hundred feet
from the house a former lake, now a mere pond well stocked with fish,
makes known its vicinity as much by a thin mist rising above the
tree-tops as by the croaking of a thousand frogs, toads, and other
amphibious gossips who discourse at sunset. The time-worn look of
everything, the deep silence of the woods, the long perspective of the
avenue, the forest in the distance, the rusty iron-work, the masses of
stone draped with velvet mosses, all made poetry of this old structure,
which still exists.