The Knight of Maison-Rouge Page 4

  “But, citizen,” said the stranger with real verve, “you are mistaken. I love the Republic as much as you do.”

  “Well, then, citizeness, if you’re such a good patriot, you have nothing to hide. Where were you coming from, where have you been?”

  “Oh, monsieur, have some pity!” said the stranger.

  In that monsieur there was such a deep and touching expression of propriety that Maurice felt certain he got her gist. “No doubt about it,” he said to himself. “This woman’s returning from some amorous tryst.” And though he did not know why, the thought gave his heart a pang and caused him suddenly to clam up.

  They headed off into the night, and when they had reached the rue de la Verrerie, having encountered three or four patrols who had let them continue freely on their way thanks to Maurice’s use of the password, an officer of a fifth patrol seemed determined to make trouble. Maurice thought it best at this point to add his name and address to the password.

  “Right,” said the officer. “That’s you taken care of, but what about the citizeness.…”

  “Go on: the citizeness?”

  “Who is she?”

  “She is … my wife’s sister.”

  The officer let them pass.

  “So, you are married, monsieur?” the stranger murmured.

  “No, madame, why do you ask?”

  “Because,” she laughed, “it would have been easier to say I was your wife.”

  “Madame,” Maurice replied solemnly, “the word wife is a sacred title, one that should not be used lightly. I do not have the honor of knowing you.”

  It was the beautiful stranger’s turn to feel a pang in the region of the heart; she said no more. By now, they were halfway across the pont-Marie. The young woman picked up the pace noticeably the closer they got to the end of the run. They zipped across the pont de la Tournelle1 in a flash.

  “Here we are in your neighborhood, I presume,” Maurice said as he stepped onto the quai Saint-Bernard.

  “Yes, citizen. But it is precisely here that I most need your help.”

  “Really, madame, you don’t want me to be indiscreet but at the same time you’re doing everything you can to excite my curiosity. That’s not nice. Let’s have a little trust; surely I’ve earned it. Won’t you do me the honor of telling me to whom I am speaking?”

  “You are speaking, monsieur, to a woman whom you have saved from the greatest danger she has ever experienced. One who will be grateful to you for the rest of her life.”

  “I’d settle for less, madame. Won’t you be a little less grateful and a little more forthcoming and tell me your name?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yet you’d have told the first police officer you met if we’d taken you to the station.”

  “No, never!” cried the stranger.

  “But then you’d have been put in jail.”

  “I was ready for anything.”

  “But these days, jail …”

  “Means the guillotine, I know.”

  “And you would have preferred the guillotine?”

  “To betrayal … To say my name would have meant betrayal!”

  “As I was saying, you’re making me play a funny part for a republican!”

  “You are playing the part of a man with a true heart. You find a poor woman being threatened but you don’t turn your back on her even though she’s a working-class girl, since she may easily be threatened again. So you snatch her from the jaws of death and bring her home to the poor slums where she lives. That’s all.”

  “Yes, you’re right; at least, that’s what it looks like. I myself might have believed that story if I hadn’t seen you, if you hadn’t spoken to me. But your beauty, the way you speak, show you to be a woman of distinction, the absolute opposite of your getup and this slum. All of which proves to me that your little late-night foray is covering up some mystery. You don’t say anything.… Well, don’t say anything. Do we still have far to go, madame?”

  At that point, they were entering the rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor.

  “You see that small blackened building?” the mystery woman asked

  Maurice, pointing to a house just visible beyond the walls of the Jardin des Plantes. “When we get there, you will leave me.”

  “As you like, madame. Your wish is my command.”

  “Are you annoyed with me?”

  “Me? Not in the slightest. Besides, what does it matter to you?”

  “It matters a lot to me, for I have one more favor to ask you.”

  “Which is?”

  “I want us to say good-bye … like proper friends.”

  “Proper friends! Oh! You do me too great an honor, madame. Funny sort of friend who doesn’t know his friend’s name and from whom his friend conceals her address, no doubt dreading she’ll see him again if she gives it to him.”

  The woman bowed her head and did not reply.

  “As for that other business, madame,” Maurice continued, “if I stumbled across your secret, you must not hold that against me. It was not my intention.”

  “Here we are, monsieur,” said the stranger.

  They were opposite the old rue Saint-Jacques, which was lined by tall black houses and pockmarked by dark alleys and lanes where factories and tanneries stood, for the Bièvre River2 runs close by.

  “Here?” said Maurice. “You’re joking! This is where you live?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Yet there you have it. Adieu, adieu, then, my brave chevalier.3 Adieu, generous protector.”

  “Adieu, madame,” Maurice replied with gentle irony. “But tell me, humor me a little, you really are out of danger now?”

  “I am.”

  “In that case, I’ll be off.”

  And with that, Maurice took two steps back and coldly saluted. The stranger didn’t move a muscle.

  “This was not what I had in mind,” she said. “Come now, monsieur Maurice, your hand.” Maurice approached the woman and held out his hand, and as he did so he felt her slip a ring onto his finger.

  “Citizeness, what do you think you’re doing? You must know you’ve lost one of your rings?”

  “Oh, monsieur, what you’re doing now is wrong.”

  “So, the only vice I was lacking, eh, madame, was ingratitude?”

  “Please, monsieur, please … my friend. Don’t leave me this way. Please, what would you like? What do you need?”

  “As payment, you mean?” said the young man savagely.

  “No,” said the stranger, flashing him a bewitching look. “But to pardon me for the secret I’m forced to keep from you.”

  Maurice saw her beautiful eyes glistening with tears in the dark and he felt her warm hand tremble in his, heard her voice, which was now as soft as a prayer, and he went instantly from anger to a feeling of wild excitement.

  “What do I need?” he cried. “I need to see you again.”

  “Can’t be done.”

  “Just once, for an hour, a minute, a second.”

  “Not possible, I tell you.”

  “What?” Maurice demanded. “You mean to tell me seriously that I’ll never see you again?”

  “Never!” said the woman in what sounded like a mournful echo.

  “Oh, madame. You really are toying with me.” And he raised his noble head and shook his long streaming hair in the manner of a man trying to break free of some power holding him against his will. The mystery woman watched him with an indefinable expression on her face. It was clear she had not gotten off scot-free from the feelings she had aroused.

  “Listen to me,” she said after a moment of silence, interrupted only by a sigh Maurice vainly sought to suppress. “Listen! Do you swear on your honor to close your eyes when I tell you and count to sixty? Cross your heart and hope to die.…”

  “And if I do, what will happen to me?”

  “I will prove my gratitude to you in a way I promise you I never will to anyone ever
again, even if they do more for me than you have—which would be hard.… That is what will happen.”

  “Surely you can just tell me.…”

  “No. Trust me, you’ll see.…”

  “Really, madame, I can’t tell whether you’re an angel or a fiend.”

  “Do you swear?”

  “Oh, all right. I swear!”

  “Whatever happens, you won’t open your eyes? … Whatever happens, you understand, even if you felt yourself being stabbed?”

  “This is the dizzy limit, madame.”

  “Swear, monsieur! It seems to me you have little to lose.”

  “All right, I swear, whatever happens,” said Maurice, closing his eyes. But he opened them again.

  “Let me see you one more time, just once, please,” he begged.

  The woman flipped back her hood with a smile not entirely free of coquetry. By the light of the moon, which slid out from between two clouds at that very moment, Maurice saw for a second time the long black curls hanging down, the perfect arc of the eyebrows, which looked painted on with India ink, two almond-shaped eyes, soft and velvety, an exquisitely chiseled nose, fresh lips gleaming like coral.

  “Oh! You are beautiful, so beautiful, too beautiful!” cried Maurice.

  “Close your eyes,” whispered the stranger, and Maurice did as he was told. The woman took both his hands in hers and spun him round. Suddenly he felt something like perfumed heat waft toward his face and a mouth brushed his mouth, leaving the ring he had spurned between his lips.

  The sensation was as fleeting as a thought and it burned like fire. Maurice felt something akin to pain, so unexpected and profound it shot to the bottom of his heart and set it singing. He lurched forward, stretching out his arms in front of him.

  “You gave me your word!” cried a voice already remote.

  Maurice pressed his palms to his eyes to resist the temptation to break his promise. He was no longer counting, he was no longer thinking; he stood silent, paralyzed yet unsteady on his legs. After a moment he heard what sounded like a door shutting fifty or sixty feet away, then everything fell silent once more. He spread his fingers, opened his eyes, looked around as though coming out of sleep; maybe he actually would have felt he was simply waking from a dream if the ring that made this incredible episode an incontestable reality were not lying there, hard between his burning lips.

  4

  THE CUSTOMS OF THE DAY

  When Maurice Lindey came to and looked around, he saw nothing but dark alleys running left and right wherever he looked. He tried to get his bearings and work out where he was, but his mind was reeling, the night was dark; the moon, which had come out briefly to shed light on the stranger’s haunting face, had gone back behind the clouds. After a moment of cruel uncertainty, he set off on the path that led to his home in the rue Roule.

  When he reached the rue Sainte-Avoye, Maurice was surprised at the number of patrols circulating in the Temple quartier.

  “What’s the matter, then, Sergeant?” he asked the chief of a very busy patrol that had just carried out a search in the rue des Fontaines.

  “The matter?” said the sergeant. “My dear officer, the matter is that they tried to break out the Capet woman1 and her brood this very night.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Some patrol of ex-aristocrats managed to get ahold of the password and worm their way into the Temple dressed as chasseurs2 of the National Guard, and they would have carted her off, too, except that, fortunately, the one who was supposed to be the corporal spoke to the officer in charge of the watch and called him ‘monsieur’; gave himself away, he did, the dirty aristocrat!”

  “I’ll be damned!” Maurice let out. “And have the conspirators been arrested?”

  “No. The patrol made it back out onto the street and scattered.”

  “Any chance of catching up with any of them?”

  “Oh! There’s only one worth catching and that’s the chief, a great tall streak of a thing. He was introduced into the watch by one of the municipal officers on duty. Did he make us run, the mongrel! But he must have found a back door somewhere and he got away through the Madelonnettes prison.”3

  In any other circumstances, Maurice would have spent the rest of the night with the patriots keeping watch over the safety of the Republic.

  But for the last hour love of the nation was no longer his main concern, so he continued on his way, the news he had just learned gradually fading from his mind and evaporating behind the experience he had just been through. Besides, these so-called attempts at helping the Queen escape had become so frequent that even patriots knew that in certain circumstances they were more than handy as a political tool, so the news did not inspire any undue anxiety in our young republican.

  When he got home, Maurice found his officieux waiting for him there. In those days people no longer had servants. Maurice, therefore, found his officieux waiting for him, indeed having fallen asleep waiting for him, and snoring fretfully.

  He woke him with all the consideration due one’s fellow, pulled his boots off for him, and sent him away so as not to have his thoughts disturbed, and then he went to bed and, since the hour was late and he was young, fell asleep in turn despite his preoccupied state.

  The next day he found a letter on his night table—a letter written in a fine, elegant, and unfamiliar hand. He looked at the seal; as sole motto, it bore the English word: Nothing.

  He opened the letter which contained these words: “Thank you! Eternal gratitude on my part in exchange for eternal forgetfulness on yours!…”

  Maurice called his servant. True patriots no longer rang for them, bells being thought to recall past servility. Besides, lots of officieux made this a condition of employment in their master’s service when they signed up.

  Maurice’s officieux had been given the name of Jean at the baptismal font some thirty years previously, but in 1792 he had had himself debaptized, by his own private authority, Jean smacking of aristocracy and of deism. He now went by the name of Agesilaus.4

  “Agesilaus!” Maurice began. “Do you know anything about this letter?”

  “No, citizen.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “The concierge.”

  “Who gave it to him?”

  “A messenger, no doubt, since there’s no national stamp on it.”

  “Go down and ask the concierge to come up.”

  The concierge came up because it was Maurice who asked him to and because Maurice was very much loved by all the officieux associated with him; but when he came, it was not without declaring that if it had been any other tenant, he would have asked him to come down.

  The concierge was called Aristides. Maurice questioned him and found that it was a stranger who had brought the letter at about eight in the morning. The young man could ask as many questions as he liked, put them any way he liked, but that was all the concierge could tell him. Maurice begged him to accept ten francs and invited him, should this strange man turn up again, to follow him without further ado and come back and tell Maurice where he had gone.

  We hasten to add that, to the great relief of Aristides, a tad humiliated by the idea of following one of his own kind, the man never reappeared.

  Left to his own devices, Maurice screwed up the letter in a fit of pique. He pulled the ring off his finger and put it with the crumpled letter on the night table and turned his face to the wall in the vain hope of going back to sleep. But when, after an hour, he’d recovered from this show of bravado, Maurice kissed the ring and reread the letter. The ring was set with a stunningly beautiful sapphire.

  The letter was, as we have said, a beguiling little note that reeked of aristocracy a mile off.

  While Maurice was lost in contemplation, the door opened. Maurice stuck the ring back on his finger and shoved the letter under his bolster. Could this be the shyness of dawning love? Was it the shame of a patriot who does not want it to get about that he has any kind of connection with s
omeone reckless enough to write such a note, the perfume alone being enough to compromise both the hand that wrote it and the hand that broke its seal?

  The man who burst in on Maurice was a young man in patriot’s garb, but of the most supreme elegance. His carmagnole was made of fine fabric, his pants were of cashmere, and his chiné hose were of finest silk. As for his Phrygian cap5 it would have put Paris himself6 to shame with its elegant shape and its luscious purple hue.

  On top of all this he wore at his belt a pair of pistols from the former royal manufacture of Versailles, and a short straight sword similar to that used by students at the Champs-de-Mars military academy.

  “Ah! You sleep, Brutus,”7 said the visitor, “while the homeland is in danger. For shame!”

  “No, Lorin,” Maurice said, smiling. “I’m not sleeping, I’m dreaming.”

  “Yes, I understand: you dream of your Eucharis.”8 “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, the woman …”

  “What woman?”

  “The woman from the rue Saint-Honoré, the woman from the patrol, the mysterious stranger for whom we risked our necks, you and I, last night.”

  “Oh, yes!” said Maurice, who knew only too well what his friend was driving at, but had no intention of giving the game away. “The mystery woman!”

  “Well, who was she?”

  “I’ve got no idea.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “Phhuh!” said Maurice with a contemptuous sneer. “Some poor woman abandoned after an amorous tryst.

  … Yes, weaklings as you see us, then,

  It’s always love that torments us men.”

  “That may well be,” Maurice muttered, now most put out by the very idea that he had at first had; he preferred to think of his beautiful mystery woman as a conspirator than as a woman in love.

  “And where does she live?”

  “I’ve got no idea.”

  “How amazing! You have no idea! Sorry, I don’t believe you.”