The Human Comedy (14 page)

“I can just see her, reading her evening prayer before bed! She certainly hasn’t forgotten me, and she must be wondering ‘Where is he now, my poor Prosper?’ But if she’s won a few francs at cards from a neighbor—maybe from your mother,” he added, nudging Wilhelm’s elbow, “she’ll go put them away in the big clay pot where she’s collecting the money she needs to buy the thirty acres next to the little plot she owns in Lescheville. Those thirty acres will easily cost about sixty thousand francs. Really good meadowland . . . Ah, if I can ever put that amount together, I would live my whole life in Lescheville and never want another thing! How often my father would talk about wanting those thirty acres and the pretty brook that winds through the fields! Well, in the end he died without ever managing to buy them. I used to play there so often!”

“Monsieur Walhenfer, haven’t you got some secret wish of your own?” asked Wilhelm.

“Yes, young man, yes indeed! But it actually did come true, and now . . .” The good fellow fell silent without finishing his sentence.

“Me,” said the innkeeper, his face slightly flushed, “last year I bought a field I’d been wanting to own for more than ten years.”

They went on chatting that way, as men do when tongues are loosened by wine, and they conceived that passing affection for one another that we indulge more generously when we travel—so that, as they stood up to prepare for sleep, Wilhelm offered the businessman his bed.

“You can accept it the more easily,” he told Walhenfer, “since I can bed down with Prosper. It certainly won’t be the first time nor the last. You are our elder, and we must honor age!”

“Ah, no!” the innkeeper said. “My wife’s bed in that room has several mattresses, you can put one of them on the floor.” And he went to close the casement window, causing the noise the cautious operation entailed.

“I accept,” said the businessman. Then, lowering his voice and looking at the two comrades, he added, “I confess I was hoping for this. My boatmen seem a little suspect . . . For tonight, I am not unhappy to be in the company of two decent, kind young men—two French soldiers! I have a hundred thousand francs’ worth of gold and diamonds in my valise!”

The affectionate reserve with which the two young men received this reckless revelation reassured the German fellow. The innkeeper helped his visitors to take apart one of the beds. Then, when all was arranged for the best, he wished them good night and went off to sleep. The businessman and the two doctors joked about the difference in their headrests: Prosper put his instrument bag and Wilhelm’s under his mattress to replace the missing pillow, while Walhenfer took special care to set his valise beneath the head of his bed.

“We’ll both of us be sleeping on top of our fortunes—you on your gold and I on my medical bag. It remains to be seen whether my instruments will ever make me as much gold as you’ve already acquired.”

“You certainly have every reason to hope so,” said the businessman. “Hard work and honesty do win out, but it takes patience.”

Walhenfer and Wilhelm soon fell asleep. Perhaps because his bed on the floor was too hard, perhaps because his extreme fatigue caused him insomnia, perhaps through some fateful state of mind, Prosper Magnan lay awake. His thoughts gradually took a bad turn. He could think of nothing else but the hundred thousand francs the businessman was sleeping on. For him, a hundred thousand francs was an enormous ready-made fortune. He began by putting it to a thousand different uses, building castles in Spain, as we all do so happily in those moments before sleep when images come alive confusedly in our minds, and when often, in the quiet of the night, ideas take on a magical force. He fulfilled his mother’s wishes: He bought the thirty acres of meadowland; he married a girl from Beauvais whom he could never hope to court with the present disparity in their circumstances. With the money he bought himself a whole lifetime of delights, and he saw himself happy—a father, a rich man, a figure of consequence in his province, perhaps even mayor of Beauvais. His Picard imagination caught fire as he sought a way to turn these fictions into reality; he put enormous energy into working out a hypothetical crime. Dreaming the businessman’s death, he distinctly saw visions of gold and diamonds. His eyes were dazzled. His heart pounded. This deliberation itself was certainly already a crime. Entranced by piles of gold, he grew drunk with murderous imaginings. He questioned whether that poor German fellow really needed to go on living, and posited that the man had never existed at all—in short, he conceived the crime in a way that gave it impunity. The other shore of the Rhine was occupied by the Austrians; beneath the window were a boat and boatmen; he could cut the sleeping man’s throat, toss him into the Rhine, slip out through the casement window with the valise, give the sailors some gold, and cross over to Austria. He went so far as to calculate whether by now he had accrued enough skill with his surgical instruments to slice off his victim’s head before the fellow could utter a single cry . . .

Here Monsieur Taillefer wiped his brow and took another sip of water.

Prosper rose from his mattress slowly and silently. Certain he had wakened no one, he dressed, walked into the common room; then, with that special intelligence a man can suddenly find in himself, with that power of skill and determination that never fails either prisoners or criminals in accomplishing their aims, he unscrewed the iron bars, slipped them from their holes without the faintest sound, set them against the wall, and opened the shutters, pressing on the hinges to muffle any creaking. The moon cast its pale brightness onto the scene and allowed him a faint view of the objects in the room where Wilhelm and Walhenfer lay sleeping. For a moment he paused, he told me. His heartbeat was so strong, so deep, so resonant that it frightened him. He feared he would not manage to act coolly; his hands were trembling and the soles of his feet felt as if they were pressing down on fiery coals. But the execution of his plan was accompanied by such elation that he saw a kind of predestination in Fate’s approval. He opened the window, returned to the bedroom, picked up his instrument bag, and looked in it for the tool best suited to carry out his crime.

“When I came to the man’s bed,” he told me, “I automatically prayed for God’s blessing.” Just as he raised his arm and gathered all his strength, he heard a kind of voice within him and seemed to glimpse a light. He flung the instrument down onto his mattress, rushed into the common room, and went to the window. Standing there, he was struck with a profound horror at himself; and sensing nonetheless that his virtue was frail, still fearing he could succumb to the trance gripping him, he leapt quickly out onto the road and strode along the Rhine, pacing back and forth before the inn like a sentinel. Several times he got as far as Andernach in his headlong walk; and several times his steps took him all the way to the slope that led to the inn. But the silence of the night was so profound, and he had such trust in the guard dogs, that at times he failed to keep watch on the window he had left open. He wanted to exhaust himself and bring on sleep. However, as he paced beneath a cloudless sky, as he gazed in wonder at the lovely stars, also perhaps affected by the pure night air and the melancholy rustle of the waves, he fell into a reverie that gradually brought him back to a wholesome moral state. Eventually reason completely swept away his momentary madness. The teachings from his upbringing, religious principles, and above all, he told me, images from the modest life he had led till then beneath the parental roof all prevailed over his troubled thoughts. After a long meditation, whose spell overtook him on the riverbank as he leaned on a broad stone, he came back and felt, he said later, so far from seeking sleep that he could stand guard over millions in gold. As his righteous character rose up again proud and strong from that struggle, he dropped to his knees in a rush of ecstasy and bliss—he thanked God, he felt happy, light, content, as he had on the day of his First Communion, when he believed himself worthy of the angels because he had spent the whole day without sinning in word, action, or thought.

He slipped back into the inn, locked the window without concern for any noise, and dropped instantly into bed. His moral and physical weariness delivered him unresisting to sleep. Moments after laying his head on the mattress, he fell into that strange, primal somnolence that often precedes deep sleep. The senses grow heavy and life is gradually abolished; thoughts go unfinished, and the last few starts of our senses simulate a kind of dream state. The air is so very heavy in here, Prosper thought, I feel as if I’m breathing damp steam. Vaguely he told himself that the atmospheric effect must be due to the contrast between the room’s muggy temperature and the fresh outdoor air. He became aware of a rhythmic sound, rather like water dripping from a spout. In a moment of panicky terror, he thought to rise and call to the innkeeper, wake the businessman or Wilhelm; but then to his misfortune, he remembered the big wooden clock and deciding that what he heard was the swing of the pendulum he fell asleep with that hazy, muddled idea.

“Would you like water, Monsieur Taillefer?” asked the host, seeing the provisioner reach mechanically for the carafe.

It was empty.

Monsieur Hermann went on with his tale after the short pause occasioned by the banker’s query.

The next morning Prosper Magnan was awakened by a great uproar. He thought he heard piercing cries, and he felt that violent wrench of nerves we experience when, as we wake, a painful sensation begun during our sleep persists. A physiological event occurs in us, a jolt (to use a workman’s term) that has never been sufficiently examined, even though it involves phenomena of some scientific interest. That awful anguish, possibly the effect of a too-abrupt rejoining of our two natures that are nearly always separated during sleep, is usually quick to pass, but now in the poor young doctor it persisted, even suddenly increased, and rose to a dreadful horripilation when he saw a pool of blood between his mattress and Walhenfer’s bed. The poor German’s head lay on the floor, his body sprawled on the bed. All the blood had poured out from the neck. Seeing the eyes still open wide and staring, seeing the blood that stained his own sheets and even his hands, recognizing his surgical instrument on the bed, Prosper Magnan fainted, and collapsed into Walhenfer’s blood.

“It was a punishment for my thoughts,” he told me later.

When he regained consciousness, he found himself in the common room. He was seated on a chair, surrounded by French soldiers before a watchful, curious throng. He stared in a stupor at a French Republican officer who was taking testimony from several witnesses and must have been compiling a report. He recognized the innkeeper and his wife, the two sailors, and the serving girl from the inn. The surgical instrument the murderer had used . . .

Here Monsieur Taillefer coughed, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his nose, and mopped his brow. These rather ordinary actions were noticed by no one but myself; all the other guests were gazing at Monsieur Hermann and listening to him with a kind of avidity. The provisioner leaned his elbow on the table, put his head in his right hand, and stared fixedly at Monsieur Hermann. From then on he never betrayed a single sign of emotion or interest, but his face remained pensive and ashen, as it had been earlier when he was playing with the crystal stopper.

The surgical instrument the murderer had used lay on the table with Prosper’s bag, wallet, and papers. The spectators gazed in turn at the material evidence and at the young man, who looked near to dying and whose dulled eyes seemed to see nothing. A hubbub from outdoors indicated the presence of the crowd drawn to the inn by news of the crime and perhaps also by the hope to glimpse the murderer. The pacing of the sentinels stationed beneath the windows of the room, the sound of their rifles, rose over the crowd’s chatter; but the inn was closed, the courtyard empty and silent. Unable to bear the gaze of the examining officer, Prosper Magnan felt his hand being clasped by someone, and he raised his eyes to see who could be his protector among this enemy mob. From the uniform he recognized the surgeon general of the demi-brigade stationed at Andernach. The man’s look was so piercing, so severe, that the poor young doctor shuddered from it, and let his head fall onto the back of his chair. A soldier put vinegar beneath his nostrils, and he quickly revived. Still, though, his haggard eyes seemed so empty of life and awareness that after taking his pulse the surgeon general told the examining officer, “Captain, it’s impossible to question this man right now.”

“Well, all right. Take him away,” the captain responded, interrupting the surgeon to address a corporal standing behind the young doctor.

“Damned coward,” the soldier muttered to Prosper. “At least try to walk strong in front of these German dogs and uphold the honor of the Republic.” The words stirred Prosper Magnan—he stood up straight and took a few steps. But when the door opened and he felt the rush of the outside air, saw the crowds hurry forward, his strength failed him and he tottered, his knees buckling.

“This rotten little sawbones, he ought to die twice over! Step it up! March, you!” growled the two soldiers supporting him.

“Oh, the coward! The coward! That’s him! There he is, look, here he comes!” The words seemed to chorus from a single voice, the clamoring voice of the mob running along beside him hurling insults, its numbers growing at every step. On the way from the inn to the prison, the uproar from the townsfolk and the soldiers as they walked, the jumble of a hundred different conversations, the sight of the sky and the coolness of the air, the scene of Andernach and the quivering of the Rhine waters—all these impressions at once assailed the doctor’s soul, indistinct and tangled, dulled like all his sensations since he woke. There were times on that walk, he told me, when he felt he had ceased to exist.

I was in prison myself at the time. (M. Hermann said, interrupting his tale.) Ardent as we all are at twenty, I was determined to defend my country, and I commanded a band of freelance resistance troops I had mustered in the Andernach region. A few nights earlier, I had run into a detachment of French troops, eight hundred men. We were two hundred at the very most. My spies had sold me out. I was thrown into the Andernach prison. It was expected I would be shot as an example to intimidate the locals. The French were talking about reprisals as well, but the murder they planned to avenge through executing me had been committed somewhere else, not here within the Electorate. My father had obtained a three-day stay of execution to go and ask for a pardon from General Augereau, who granted it. So I saw Prosper Magnan as he was brought into the prison at Andernach, and I was struck by a profound pity. Pale as he was, disheveled, all bloody, still his face had a quality of candor, of innocence, that affected me powerfully. To my eyes, he looked like Germany itself, with his long blond hair, his blue eyes. A veritable picture of my poor faltering country, he seemed to me a victim, not a murderer. As he passed my window, he threw out—I don’t know to where—the bitter, mournful smile of a madman recovering a fleeting glimmer of sanity. That smile was absolutely not the smile of a murderer. When I saw the jailer, I asked about his new prisoner. “He hasn’t said a word since we put him into his cell. He sat down, he set his head in his hands, and now he’s sleeping, or thinking about his troubles. From what the Frenchmen say he’ll be tried tomorrow morning, and he’ll be shot within twenty-four hours.”