Farewell
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Honore de Balzac >> Farewell
She quite understood the signal when he whistled /Partant pour la
Syrie/, but he could never succeed in inducing her to pronounce her
own name--/Stephanie/. Philip persevered in his heart-rending task,
sustained by a hope that never left him. If on some bright autumn
morning he saw her sitting quietly on a bench under a poplar tree,
grown brown now as the season wore, the unhappy lover would lie at her
feet and gaze into her eyes as long as she would let him gaze, hoping
that some spark of intelligence might gleam from them. At times he
lent himself to an illusion; he would imagine that he saw the hard,
changeless light in them falter, that there was a new life and
softness in them, and he would cry, "Stephanie! oh, Stephanie! you
hear me, you see me, do you not?"
But for her the sound of his voice was like any other sound, the
stirring of the wind in the trees, or the lowing of the cow on which
she scrambled; and the colonel wrung his hands in a despair that lost
none of its bitterness; nay, time and these vain efforts only added to
his anguish.
One evening, under the quiet sky, in the midst of the silence and
peace of the forest hermitage, M. Fanjat saw from a distance that the
Baron was busy loading a pistol, and knew that the lover had given up
all hope. The blood surged to the old doctor's heart; and if he
overcame the dizzy sensation that seized on him, it was because he
would rather see his niece live with a disordered brain than lose her
for ever. He hurried to the place.
"What are you doing?" he cried.
"That is for me," the colonel answered, pointing to a loaded pistol on
the bench, "and this is for her!" he added, as he rammed down the wad
into the pistol that he held in his hands.
The Countess lay stretched out on the ground, playing with the balls.
"Then you do not know that last night, as she slept, she murmured
'Philip?'" said the doctor quietly, dissembling his alarm.
"She called my name?" cried the Baron, letting his weapon fall.
Stephanie picked it up, but he snatched it out of her hands, caught
the other pistol from the bench, and fled.
"Poor little one!" exclaimed the doctor, rejoicing that his stratagem
had succeeded so well. He held her tightly to his heart as he went on.
"He would have killed you, selfish that he is! He wants you to die
because he is unhappy. He cannot learn to love you for your own sake,
little one! We forgive him, do we not? He is senseless; you are only
mad. Never mind; God alone shall take you to Himself. We look upon you
as unhappy because you no longer share our miseries, fools that we
are! . . . Why, she is happy," he said, taking her on his knee;
"nothing troubles her; she lives like the birds, like the deer--"
Stephanie sprang upon a young blackbird that was hopping about, caught
it with a little shriek of glee, twisted its neck, looked at the dead
bird, and dropped it at the foot of a tree without giving it another
thought.
The next morning at daybreak the colonel went out into the garden to
look for Stephanie; hope was very strong in him. He did not see her,
and whistled; and when she came, he took her arm, and for the first
time they walked together along an alley beneath the trees, while the
fresh morning wind shook down the dead leaves about them. The colonel
sat down, and Stephanie, of her own accord, lit upon his knee. Philip
trembled with gladness.
"Love!" he cried, covering her hands with passionate kisses, "I am
Philip . . ."
She looked curiously at him.
"Come close," he added, as he held her tightly. "Do you feel the
beating of my heart? It has beat for you, for you only. I love you
always. Philip is not dead. He is here. You are sitting on his knee.
You are my Stephanie, I am your Philip."
"Farewell!" she said, "farewell!"
The colonel shivered. He thought that some vibration of his highly
wrought feeling had surely reached his beloved; that the heart-rending
cry, drawn from him by hope, the utmost effort of a love that must
last for ever, of passion in its ecstasy, striving to reach the soul
of the woman he loved, must awaken her.
"Oh, Stephanie! we shall be happy yet!"
A cry of satisfaction broke from her, a dim light of intelligence
gleamed in her eyes.
"She knows me! . . . Stephanie! . . ."
The colonel felt his heart swell, and tears gathered under his
eyelids. But all at once the Countess held up a bit of sugar for him
to see; she had discovered it by searching diligently for it while he
spoke. What he had mistaken for a human thought was a degree of reason
required for a monkey's mischievous trick!
Philip fainted. M. Fanjat found the Countess sitting on his prostrate
body. She was nibbling her bit of sugar, giving expression to her
enjoyment by little grimaces and gestures that would have been thought
clever in a woman in full possession of her senses if she tried to
mimic her paroquet or her cat.
"Oh, my friend!" cried Philip, when he came to himself. "This is like
death every moment of the day! I love her too much! I could bear
anything if only through her madness she had kept some little trace of
womanhood. But, day after day, to see her like a wild animal, not even
a sense of modesty left, to see her--"
"So you must have a theatrical madness, must you!" said the doctor
sharply, "and your prejudices are stronger than your lover's devotion?
What, monsieur! I resign to you the sad pleasure of giving my niece
her food, and the enjoyment of her playtime; I have kept for myself
nothing but the most burdensome cares. I watch over her while you are
asleep, I-- Go, monsieur, and give up the task. Leave this dreary
hermitage; I can live with my little darling; I understand her
disease; I study her movements; I know her secrets. Some day you shall
thank me."
The colonel left the Minorite convent, that he was destined to see
only once again. The doctor was alarmed by the effect that his words
made upon his guest; his niece's lover became as dear to him as his
niece. If either of them deserved to be pitied, that one was certainly
Philip; did he not bear alone the burden of an appalling sorrow?
The doctor made inquiries, and learned that the hapless colonel had
retired to a country house of his near Saint-Germain. A dream had
suggested to him a plan for restoring the Countess to reason, and the
doctor did not know that he was spending the rest of the autumn in
carrying out a vast scheme. A small stream ran through his park, and
in winter time flooded a low-lying land, something like the plain on
the eastern side of the Beresina. The village of Satout, on the slope
of a ridge above it, bounded the horizon of a picture of desolation,
something as Studzianka lay on the heights that shut in the swamp of
the Beresina. The colonel set laborers to work to make a channel to
resemble the greedy river that had swallowed up the treasures of
France and Napoleon's army. By the help of his memories, Philip
reconstructed on his own lands the bank where General Eble had built
his bridges. He drove in piles, and then set fire to them, so as to
reproduce the charred and blackened balks of timber that on either
side of the river told the stragglers that their retreat to France had
been cut off. He had materials collected like the fragments out of
which his comrades in misfortune had made the raft; his park was laid
waste to complete the illusion on which his last hopes were founded.
He ordered ragged uniforms and clothing for several hundred peasants.
Huts and bivouacs and batteries were raised and burned down. In short,
he omitted no device that could reproduce that most hideous of all
scenes. He succeeded. When, in the earliest days of December, snow
covered the earth with a thick white mantle, it seemed to him that he
saw the Beresina itself. The mimic Russia was so startlingly real,
that several of his old comrades recognized the scene of their past
sufferings. M. de Sucy kept the secret of the drama to be enacted with
this tragical background, but it was looked upon as a mad freak in
several circles of society in Paris.
In the early days of the month of January 1820, the colonel drove over
to the Forest of l'Isle-Adam in a carriage like the one in which M.
and Mme. de Vandieres had driven from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses
closely resembled that other pair that he had risked his life to bring
from the Russian lines. He himself wore the grotesque and soiled
clothes, accoutrements, and cap that he had worn on the 29th of
November 1812. He had even allowed his hair and beard to grow, and
neglected his appearance, that no detail might be lacking to recall
the scene in all its horror.
"I guessed what you meant to do," cried M. Fanjat, when he saw the
colonel dismount. "If you mean your plan to succeed, do not let her
see you in that carriage. This evening I will give my niece a little
laudanum, and while she sleeps, we will dress her in such clothes as
she wore at Studzianka, and put her in your traveling-carriage. I will
follow you in a berline."
Soon after two o'clock in the morning, the young Countess was lifted
into the carriage, laid on the cushions, and wrapped in a coarse
blanket. A few peasants held torches while this strange elopement was
arranged.
A sudden cry rang through the silence of night, and Philip and the
doctor, turning, saw Genevieve. She had come out half-dressed from the
low room where she slept.
"Farewell, farewell; it is all over, farewell!" she called, crying
bitterly.
"Why, Genevieve, what is it?" asked M. Fanjat.
Genevieve shook her head despairingly, raised her arm to heaven,
looked at the carriage, uttered a long snarling sound, and with
evident signs of profound terror, slunk in again.
"'Tis a good omen," cried the colonel. "The girl is sorry to lose her
companion. Very likely she sees that Stephanie is about to recover her
reason."
"God grant it may be so!" answered M. Fanjat, who seemed to be
affected by this incident. Since insanity had interested him, he had
known several cases in which a spirit of prophecy and the gift of
second sight had been accorded to a disordered brain--two faculties
which many travelers tell us are also found among savage tribes.
So it happened that, as the colonel had foreseen and arranged,
Stephanie traveled across the mimic Beresina about nine o'clock in the
morning, and was awakened by an explosion of rockets about a hundred
paces from the scene of action. It was a signal. Hundreds of peasants
raised a terrible clamor, like the despairing shouts that startled the
Russians when twenty thousand stragglers learned that by their own
fault they were delivered over to death or to slavery.
When the Countess heard the report and the cries that followed, she
sprang out of the carriage, and rushed in frenzied anguish over the
snow-covered plain; she saw the burned bivouacs and the fatal raft
about to be launched on a frozen Beresina. She saw Major Philip
brandishing his sabre among the crowd. The cry that broke from Mme. de
Vandieres made the blood run cold in the veins of all who heard it.
She stood face to face with the colonel, who watched her with a
beating heart. At first she stared blankly at the strange scene about
her, then she reflected. For an instant, brief as a lightning flash,
there was the same quick gaze and total lack of comprehension that we
see in the bright eyes of a bird; then she passed her hand across her
forehead with the intelligent expression of a thinking being; she
looked round on the memories that had taken substantial form, into the
past life that had been transported into her present; she turned her
face to Philip--and saw him! An awed silence fell upon the crowd. The
colonel breathed hard, but dared not speak; tears filled the doctor's
eyes. A faint color overspread Stephanie's beautiful face, deepening
slowly, till at last she glowed like a girl radiant with youth. Still
the bright flush grew. Life and joy, kindled within her at the blaze
of intelligence, swept through her like leaping flames. A convulsive
tremor ran from her feet to her heart. But all these tokens, which
flashed on the sight in a moment, gathered and gained consistence, as
it were, when Stephanie's eyes gleamed with heavenly radiance, the
light of a soul within. She lived, she thought! She shuddered--was it
with fear? God Himself unloosed a second time the tongue that had been
bound by death, and set His fire anew in the extinguished soul. The
electric torrent of the human will vivified the body whence it had so
long been absent.
"Stephanie!" the colonel cried.
"Oh! it is Philip!" said the poor Countess.
She fled to the trembling arms held out towards her, and the embrace
of the two lovers frightened those who beheld it. Stephanie burst into
tears.
Suddenly the tears ceased to flow; she lay in his arms a dead weight,
as if stricken by a thunderbolt, and said faintly:
"Farewell, Philip! . . . I love you. . . . farewell!"
"She is dead!" cried the colonel, unclasping his arms.
The old doctor received the lifeless body of his niece in his arms as
a young man might have done; he carried her to a stack of wood and set
her down. He looked at her face, and laid a feeble hand, tremulous
with agitation, upon her heart--it beat no longer.
"Can it really be so?" he said, looking from the colonel, who stood
there motionless, to Stephanie's face. Death had invested it with a
radiant beauty, a transient aureole, the pledge, it may be, of a
glorious life to come.
"Yes, she is dead."
"Oh, but that smile!" cried Philip; "only see that smile. Is it
possible?"
"She has grown cold already," answered M. Fanjat.
M. de Sucy made a few strides to tear himself from the sight; then he
stopped, and whistled the air that the mad Stephanie had understood;
and when he saw that she did not rise and hasten to him, he walked
away, staggering like a drunken man, still whistling, but he did not
turn again.
In society General de Sucy is looked upon as very agreeable, and above
all things, as very lively and amusing. Not very long ago a lady
complimented him upon his good humor and equable temper.
"Ah! madame," he answered, "I pay very dearly for my merriment in the
evening if I am alone."
"Then, you are never alone, I suppose."
"No," he answered, smiling.
If a keen observer of human nature could have seen the look that
Sucy's face wore at that moment, he would, without doubt, have
shuddered.
"Why do you not marry?" the lady asked (she had several daughters of
her own at a boarding-school). "You are wealthy; you belong to an old
and noble house; you are clever; you have a future before you;
everything smiles upon you."
"Yes," he answered; "one smile is killing me--"
On the morrow the lady heard with amazement that M. de Sucy had shot
himself through the head that night.
The fashionable world discussed the extraordinary news in divers ways,
and each had a theory to account for it; play, love, ambition,
irregularities in private life, according to the taste of the speaker,
explained the last act of the tragedy begun in 1812. Two men alone, a
magistrate and an old doctor, knew that Monsieur le Comte de Sucy was
one of those souls unhappy in the strength God gives to them to enable
them to triumph daily in a ghastly struggle with a mysterious horror.
If for a minute God withdraws His sustaining hand, they succumb.
PARIS, March 1830.