The Human Comedy (16 page)

I took his seat, and came face-to-face with the murderer.

“Monsieur,” I said as he was dealing me my cards, “would you be so kind as to begin again?”

He promptly moved his chips from left to right. My dinner partner came to stand beside me; I threw her a meaningful glance.

“Would you be Monsieur Frederic Taillefer,” I asked him, “whose family I knew quite well in Beauvais?”

“Yes, monsieur,” he answered.

He dropped his cards, turned white, put his head between his hands, asked one of his bettors to take over his game, and stood up. “It is too warm in here!” he exclaimed. “I fear—”

He did not finish. His face suddenly looked terribly ill, and he hastily left the room. The master of the house saw Taillefer out, quite concerned about his state. My neighbor and I looked at each other, a kind of bitter disapproval on her face.

“Do you think your behavior is very merciful?” she asked, drawing me into a window recess as I left the card table after losing the game. “Would you assume the power to see into every heart? Why not let human justice and divine justice take their course? We might possibly avoid the one but never the other. Does a judge’s position strike you as enviable? You’ve practically played the executioner’s role tonight.”

“So, then . . . first you share and even stimulate my curiosity, and now you give me moral lessons?”

“You have made me reconsider,” she said.

“In other words, it’s peace to scoundrels, war to the miserable, and deify wealth! But let’s drop the subject,” I went on, laughing. “Please look at the young lady who’s just entering the room.”

“Yes, and . . . ?”

“I saw her three days ago at the Neapolitan ambassador’s ball, and I’ve fallen passionately in love with her. I beg you, tell me her name. No one there was able to.”

“That is Mademoiselle Victorine Taillefer!”

My head spun.

“Her stepmother,” my companion said, and I could barely hear her voice, “has brought her home from the convent where she was late to finish her education. For a long time
her father refused to acknowledge her. This is her first visit here. She’s very beautiful and very rich
.”

Her words were accompanied by a sardonic smile. Just then we heard violent, muffled screams. They seemed to come from a nearby apartment, and they resounded faintly through the gardens.

“Isn’t that Monsieur Taillefer’s voice?” I cried.

We turned all our attention to the sound as fearsome groans reached our ears. The banker’s wife ran hastily toward us and closed the window. “We must avoid any scenes,” she said. “If Mademoiselle Taillefer were to hear her father, she could have a nervous attack!”

The banker returned to the salon, sought out Victorine, and spoke quietly to her. The young woman uttered a cry, rushed to the door, and disappeared. The occurrence caused a great sensation. The games stopped. People questioned one another. The murmur of voices rose and groups formed.

“Could Monsieur Taillefer have—” I asked.

“Killed himself?” my neighbor said, teasingly. “You’d be glad to wear mourning, I imagine!”

“But what has actually happened to him?”

The mistress of the house replied, “The poor man, he has some disorder—I never do remember the name, although Dr. Brousson has told me often enough—and he has just had another attack.”

“What sort of trouble is it?” a magistrate asked suddenly.

“Oh, it’s a terrible thing, monsieur,” she replied. “The doctors have no remedy for it. I understand the pain is atrocious. One day poor Taillefer had an attack while he was staying with me in the country, and I had to go to a neighbor’s house to get away from the sound. He screams horribly, he wants to kill himself: So his daughter had to have him lashed to his bed and put in a straitjacket. The poor man claims there are wild animals in his head, gnawing at his brain; it stabs and saws at him, this dreadful tugging inside every nerve. He has such pain in his head that he couldn’t even feel those burning moxa sticks they used to apply in an effort to relieve him, but Dr. Brousson—he engaged him as his doctor—forbade that treatment, saying that this is a nervous disorder, an inflammation of the nerves, and what he needed was leeches to the neck and opium on his head . . . indeed, the attacks do come less often, only once a year now, in late autumn. When he recovers, Taillefer says he would rather be put to the wheel than experience such pain again.”

“Well, he does seem to be suffering a great deal now,” said a broker, a fellow considered the wit among the group.

“Oh,” she continued, “last year he nearly died. He had gone out alone to his country property on some urgent business and had an attack; with no one there to help him, it seems he lay for twenty-two hours, stretched out stiff on the verge of death. Only a very hot bath brought him to.”

“Then is it a kind of tetanus?” asked the broker.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s suffered for thirty years now; he says it began in the army, when a shot on board ship sent a wooden splinter into his head. But Brousson hopes to cure him. They say the English have discovered a safe way to treat the condition with prussic acid.”

Just then a scream more piercing than any before echoed through the house and sent a chill of horror through us.

“There, that’s what I was hearing every few moments,” the banker’s wife resumed. “It would make me leap out of my seat, it was a terrible strain on my nerves. But the strange thing is—even suffering such unimaginable pain, poor Taillefer is never at risk of dying from it. He eats and drinks normally in the intervals when the dreadful torture lets up. (Nature is very bizarre!) A German doctor told him it is a kind of gout of the head, and Brousson believes something similar.”

I left the group gathered around the mistress of the house and went to join Mademoiselle Taillefer, just as a valet came to fetch her.

“Ah, my God, my God!” she sobbed. “What did my father ever do against heaven to deserve to suffer this way? Such a good man!”

I went down the stairs with her, and as I helped her into her carriage I saw her father doubled over inside. Mademoiselle Taillefer tried to quiet her father’s moans, covering his mouth with her kerchief; unfortunately he caught sight of me, his face seemed to tighten still more, and a convulsive cry split the air. He gave me a hideous look, and the carriage drove off.

The dinner that evening had a cruel influence on my life and feelings. I loved Mademoiselle Taillefer, perhaps precisely because honor and decency forbade me to marry into the family of a murderer, no matter how good a father and husband he might be. Some incomprehensible force drove me to arrange my introduction into houses where I knew I might encounter Victorine. Often, after swearing that I would never see her again, the same evening I would find myself at her side. My pleasure was immense: My legitimate love, burdened by that chimerical remorse, came to feel like a criminal passion. I detested myself for greeting Taillefer civilly when he chanced to be with his daughter, but greet him I did!

Unfortunately Victorine is not merely a pretty woman—she is cultivated, full of talents and grace, without the least pedantry or the faintest hint of pretention. She is reserved in conversation, her nature has a melancholy grace that no one can resist; she loves me, or at least she lets me think so; she has a certain smile she reveals to no one but myself; and when she speaks to me her voice grows gentler still. Oh, she does love me—but she adores her father; but she praises his goodness, his kindness, his exquisite qualities. These tributes become so many dagger thrusts into my heart.

One day I almost implicated myself in the crime of the Taillefer family’s wealth: I nearly proposed to Victorine. So I fled. I traveled—I went to Germany, to Andernach . . .

But then I returned. I found Victorine pale, grown thin! If I had found her hearty and merry, I would have been spared. But now my passion flared anew with extraordinary force. Fearing that my scruples could degenerate into monomania, I decided to convoke a Sanhedrin, a council of unbiased minds, to cast some light onto this ethical and philosophical problem. The issue had become more complicated since my return.

Two days ago I gathered those of my friends whom I consider to possess the greatest degree of probity, delicacy, and honor. I invited two Englishmen (one a secretary at the embassy and one a Puritan), a former French government minister (now a mature political figure), a few young fellows still living in a rapture of innocence, an elderly priest, my old guardian (an unsophisticated man who handed in so fine a guardianship report on me that the Palace still remembers it), as well as a lawyer, a notary, a judge . . . That is, a range of social viewpoints, of practical capacities. We began with good food, good talk, a good boisterous racket; then, at dessert, I gave a straightforward account of my story and, without disclosing the name of my beloved, I asked for some solid counsel.

“Advise me, my friends,” I said as I ended the tale. “Discuss the question seriously, as if it were a legislative proposal. The voting urn and the billiard balls will be brought in, and you will vote for or against my marrying, with all the confidentiality proper to an election.”

Suddenly a deep silence fell. The notary recused himself: “I have a pressing contract to draw up.”

The wine had reduced my old guardian to silence, and soon I put him into the hands of another guardian to see that no accident should befall him on his way home.

“I understand!” I exclaimed. “Not giving me an opinion tells me very emphatically what I must do.”

The group stirred.

A landowner, who had donated funds for General Foy’s children and his tomb, quoted Racine: “
Like virtue, there are different degrees to a crime
!”

“Babbler,” the former minister muttered, nudging me with his elbow.

“What is the problem?” asked a duke, whose fortune consisted of property confiscated from the Protestants who resisted the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The attorney rose. “As a matter of law, the case before us would not pose the slightest difficulty. Monsieur the duke is correct!” declared the legal mouthpiece. “There is such a thing as a statute of limitations. Where would we all be if it were required to look into the source of every fortune! This is a matter of conscience. If you insist on seeking an answer from some tribunal, go to the one that deals with penitence—the confessional.” That said, the code incarnate sat back down and swallowed a glass of champagne.

The man charged with explicating the Gospel, the good priest, rose to his feet. “God made us frail things,” he declared firmly. “If you love the heiress to the crime, marry her, but take only the property she inherited from her mother’s side and give the father’s portion to the poor.”

“But,” exclaimed one of those merciless quibblers so commonly found in social circles, “the father himself may have married so well only because of his ill-gotten fortune. Thus, even the least of his privileges might be considered a fruit of his crime.”

“This very discussion is itself a verdict. There are some matters a man does not puzzle over,” declared my former tutor, who believed he was enlightening the group by this drunken sally.

“Yes!” said the embassy secretary.

“Yes!” cried the priest.

The two men meant different things.

A man of the
Doctrinaire Party
, who had missed election to the parliament by one hundred fifty votes out of one hundred fifty-five, rose to speak. “Messieurs, this phenomenal accident, intellectual in its nature, is the sort of event that stands out most vividly from the usual conditions ruling society,” he intoned. “Thus, the decision should be reached through an extemporaneous act of consciousness, a sudden idea, an instructive judgment, an ephemeral nuance of our inmost apprehension, akin to the flashes that make up the sensation of taste. Let us vote.”

“Let us vote!”

I had supplied each man with two balls, one white and one red. The white, symbol of virginity, would rule out the marriage; the red ball would favor it. Out of delicacy, I myself abstained from voting. My friends numbered seventeen, thus nine would make an absolute majority. Each person stepped up to drop a ball into a narrow-necked reed basket used to shake up the numbered marbles that tournament players draw to determine their order; we were spurred on by lively curiosity, for the idea of deciding a strictly ethical question by ballot was quite novel.

In the end I counted nine white balls! A result that didn’t surprise me, though I did consider how many men my own age I had invited to join my tribunal. There were nine of these casuists, and they all felt the same.

“Ah!” I thought. “There is an unspoken unanimity here in favor of the marriage, and another unanimity against it! How shall I get out of this fix?

“Where does the father-in-law live?” blurted one of my classmates, who was less clever at dissembling than the others.

“There is no longer a father-in-law,” I declared. “Until recently, my conscience spoke clearly enough to make it superfluous to ask your advice. That voice may be weaker now, and here is the reason for my uncertainty: Two months ago I received this enchanting letter.”

I showed them the following invitation, drawn from my wallet:

YOU ARE INVITED TO ATTEND

THE FUNERAL PROCESSION, SERVICE, AND INTERMENT

OF MONSIEUR JEAN-FREDERIC TAILLEFER

OF THE MAISON TAILLEFER & COMPANY,

FORMER PROVISIONER OF MEATS TO THE ARMY COMMISSARY,

IN HIS LIFETIME CHEVALIER OF THE LEGION OF HONOR

AND OF THE GOLDEN SPUR,

CAPTAIN OF THE FIRST COMPANY OF GRENADIERS

OF THE SECOND LEGION OF THE NATIONAL GUARD OF PARIS

DIED MAY 1 IN HIS HOUSE ON RUE JOUBERT

WHICH WILL TAKE PLACE AT . . .

SENT BY . . .

“Now what do I do?” I went on. “I shall set you the question very broadly. There is certainly a pool of blood in Mademoiselle Taillefer’s estate; the father’s legacy is bloodstained ground, I know that. But Prosper Magnan left no heirs; I have been unable to locate the family of the pin manufacturer who was murdered at Andernach. To whom, then, should the fortune be ‘restored’? And should it be the whole fortune that is restored? Have I the right to disclose a truth discovered by chance; the right to add a decapitated head to the dowry of an innocent girl, to cause her to dream bad dreams, to strip her of a cherished illusion, to kill off her father a second time by telling her, ‘Your every sou is stained with blood’? I borrowed an old churchman’s copy of the
Dictionary of Problems of Conscience
, and I found no solution to resolve my doubts. Set up a religious fund to pray for Prosper Magnan, or for Walhenfer, or for Taillefer? This is the middle of the nineteenth century! Build a hospice or establish some award for good works? The prize would go to rascals. As for most of our hospitals, they seem to have become havens for vice these days! And anyhow, such grants, which mainly benefit personal vanity, would they constitute ‘reparations’? And do I even owe reparations?