The Queen Pedauque by Anatole France

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"And now, Jacques," she added somewhat hurriedly, "I must leave you,
and quickly; I can hear the steps of M. d'Anquetil descending the
stairs."

She pressed a hasty kiss on my burning lips, giving and prolonging
it with the violent voluptuousness of fear, as the spurred boots of
her sweetheart made the wooden steps of the stairs creak, and the
intriguer was in fear of losing her Dutch linen trousseau and her
godroon silver pot.

The postboy lowered the steps of the _coupe_, but M. d'Anquetil
asked Jahel if it would not be more pleasant to travel all four
together in the large compartment, and I recognised that that was
the first effect of his intimacy with Jahel, and that the full
satisfaction of his desires had left it less agreeable to be alone
with her. My good old tutor had taken care to provide himself with
five or six bottles of white wine from the cellar of _The Armed
Man_, which he laid under the cushions, and which we drank to
overcome the monotony of the journey.

At midday we arrived at Joigny, a neat and pretty town. Foreseeing
that my ready money would be all used before we could arrive at the
end of our journey, and finding the idea intolerable of letting M.
d'Anquetil pay my part in the travelling expenses unless I was
compelled to do so by the most unavoidable necessity, I resolved to
sell a ring and a medallion, gifts from my mother, and went about
the town in quest of a jeweller ready to buy them. I discovered one
in the square opposite the church, who sold crosses and chains in a
shop under the sign of _The Good Faith_. What was my astonishment
to find in this very shop, before the counter, my good master, showing
to the jeweller five or six little diamonds, and asking the shopman what
price he would offer for those stones. I recognised them immediately as
those which M. d'Asterac had shown us.

The jeweller examined the stones, and looking at the abbe from under
his spectacles said:

"Sir, these stones would be of great value if they were genuine. But
they are not, and no touchstone is needed to find that out. These
are nothing but glass beads, good only for children to play with, or
to be used in the crown of a village Holy Virgin, where they would
have a charming effect."

Having listened to that reply, M. Coignard picked up his diamonds
and turned his back on the jeweller. In so doing he became aware of
my presence, and looked rather confused over it. I brought my
business to an end promptly, and meeting my dear old tutor at the
shop door I mildly reproached him with the wrong he had done to
himself, as well as to his companions, by taking these stones, which
for his greater guilt might have been real.

"My son," he replied, "God, to keep me innocent of crime, willed
these stones to be false and a mere sham. I avow to you that I did
wrong to take them. You seem sorry about it; it's a leaf of my
life's book I should like to tear out, like some others not so neat
and immaculate as they ought to be. I understand deeply all that is
reprehensible in my conduct. But no man has a right to be entirely
cast down when he is faulty, and just now, and in this special case,
I think I ought to say of myself, in the words of an illustrious
learned man: 'Consider your great frailty, of which you make but too
often a show; and withal it is for your salvation that such things
should rise up in the road of your life. Not everything is lost for
you if oftentimes you find yourself afflicted and rudely tempted;
and if you succumb to temptation you're a man, not a god; you're
flesh and blood, not an angel. How could you expect to remain always
in a state of virtue when the angels in heaven and the first man in
Eden could not remain faithful to virtue?' Such are, my dear
Tournebroche, the only conversations adapted to the present state of
my soul. But, after this unhappy occurrence, which I do not wish to
dwell on longer, is it not time to return to the inn, there to
drink, in company with the postboys, who are simpleminded and of
easy intercourse, one or more bottles of country wine?"

I quite agreed, and we soon reached the hostelry, where we found M.
d'Anquetil, who, returning like ourselves from the town, had brought
some playing cards. He played a game of piquet with my tutor, and
when we resumed our journey they continued to play in the carriage.
That rage for play which occupied my rival gave me occasion for an
undisturbed conversation with Jahel, who liked very much to chat
with me, since she was left to herself. Her talk had a kind of
bitter sweetness for me. Reproaching her for her perfidy and
unfaithfulness, I gave vent to my grief in feeble or violent
complaints.

"Alas! Jahel!" I said, "the memory and the image of your tenderness,
which made but lately my dearest delight, have become a cruel
torture to me when I think that to-day you belong to another person,
whereas formerly you were mine."

She replied:

"A woman does not behave equally to all men."

And when I prolonged my lamentations and reproaches to excess she
said:

"I am quite aware that I have caused you some pain. But that is no
reason for you to plague me a hundred times a day with your useless
moans."

M. d'Anquetil when he lost was in a bad temper and molested Jahel,
while she, anything but patient, threatened to write to her Uncle
Mosaide to come and fetch her back. These quarrels were at first
rather pleasant to me, and gave me no small hopes; but after a
repeated renewal of them I became rather anxious, as they were
always followed by impetuous reconciliations, which exploded
suddenly into kisses and lascivious whisperings. M. d'Anquetil could
hardly bear my presence. He had on the other hand a vivid tenderness
for my good tutor, which he well deserved for his always joyful
humour and the incomparable elegance of his mind. They played and
drank together with a daily growing sympathy. Knee to knee, so as to
steady the table whereon they played cards they laughed, bantered,
chaffed each other, and if occasionally they became angry, and threw
the cards in one another's face, and swore at each other with such
oaths as would have made the boxers of Port Saint Nicolas or the
bargemen of the Mail blush, M. d'Anquetil swore by God Almighty, the
Holy Virgin and all the saints, that in all his life he had never
met with a worse thief than the Abbe Coignard. Notwithstanding it
remained clearly evident that he liked my good tutor; and it was a
real pleasure, as soon as one of these quarrels had terminated, to
listen to his laughter as he said:

"Abbe, you'll be my almoner and play piquet with me. You'll also
have to hunt with us. In the remotest corner of the Perche we will
look out for a horse strong enough to carry your weight, and you'll
get hunting clothes like the ones I saw worn by the Bishop of Uzes.
It is, besides, high time you had a new suit of clothes; your
breeches, abbe, hardly keep on your behind."

Jahel also inclined towards the irresistible charm with which my
dear tutor influenced all mankind. She made up her mind to repair,
if possible, all the disorders of his dress. First she tore up one
of her gowns and used the pieces to patch up the coat and breeches
of my venerable friend; she also made him a present of a laced
handkerchief to use as a band. My good tutor accepted these little
presents with a dignity full of graciousness. More than once I had
occasion to observe that he was a gallant when talking to women. He
took a lively interest in them without ever showing the slightest
indiscretion. He praised them with the science of a connoisseur,
giving them counsels out of his long experience, diffusing over them
the unlimited indulgence of a heart always ready to forgive any kind
of human weakness, and withal, never omitted any occasion to make
them understand the great and useful truths.

We arrived on the fourth day of our journey at Montbard, and
alighted on a hill, from which we could overlook the whole town,
which appeared in a small space as if it had been painted on canvas
by a clever limner anxious to reproduce every detail.

"Look," my dear old tutor said, "on these steeples, towers, roofs,
which rise up out of the green. It is a town, and without actually
searching for its history and name, it is well to contemplate it as
the worthiest subject of meditation we may encounter on the surface
of the world. As a fact any town furnishes material for speculations
of the spirit. The postboys tell us that yonder is Montbard, a place
utterly unknown to me. Nevertheless I am not afraid to affirm, by
analogy, that the people living therein resemble ourselves, are
egotistic cowards, perfidious gluttons, dissolute. Otherwise they
could not be human beings and descendants of Adam, at once miserable
and venerable, and in whom all our instincts, down to the most
ignoble, have their august origin. The only possible doubtful matter
with yonder people, is to know if they are more inclined to food or
to procreation. But a doubt is hardly permissible; a philosopher
will soundly opine that hunger is for these unhappy ones a more
pressing necessity than love. In the greenness of my youth I
believed that the human animal is before all things inclined to
sexual intercourse. But that was a wanton error, as it is quite
clear that human beings are more interested in conserving their own
life than in giving life to others. Hunger is the axis of humanity;
but after all, as it seems to be useless to discuss the matter any
further, I'll say, with your permission, that the life of mortals
has two poles--hunger and love. And here it is that one has to open
ears and soul! These hideous creatures who are born only to devour
or to embrace furiously, one the other, live together under the sway
of laws which precisely interdict their satisfying that double and
fundamental concupiscence. These ingenious animals, having become
citizens, voluntarily impose on themselves all sorts of privations;
they respect the property of their neighbours, which is prodigious,
if you take their avaricious nature into consideration; they observe
the rules of modesty, which is an enormous hypocrisy, but generally
consists in but seldom speaking of that of which they think without
ceasing. Then, let's be true and honest, gentlemen, when we look on
a woman, we do not attach our thoughts to the beauties of her soul
or the pleasantness of her spirit; when we approach her we have in
view principally her natural form. And the amiable creatures know it
so well that they have their dresses made by the fashionable
dressmakers and take good care not only not to veil their charms,
but to exaggerate them by all sorts of artifices. And Mademoiselle
Jahel, who certainly is not a savage, would be distressed if, on
her, art had gained the advantage over nature to such a degree as to
prevent the fulness of her bosom and the roundness of her thighs
being seen. And so it is that, since Adam's fall, we see mankind
hungry and incontinent. Why do they, when assembled in towns, impose
on themselves privations of all kinds, and submit to a rule of life
contrary to their own corrupted nature? It is said that they find it
advantageous, and that they feel that their individual security
depends on such restriction. But that would be to suppose them to
have too much reasoning power, and, what's more, a false reasoning,
because it is absurd to save one's life at the expense of all that
makes it reasonable and valuable. It is further said that fear keeps
them obedient, and it is true that prison, gallows and wheels are
excellent assurers of submission to existing laws. But it is also
certain that prejudice conspires with the laws, and it is not easy
to see how compulsion could have been universally established. Laws
are said to be the necessary conformity of things; but we have
become aware that that conformity is contradictory to nature, and
far from being necessary. Therefore, gentlemen, I'll look for the
source and origin of the laws not in man, but outside man, and I
should think that, being strangers to mankind, they derive from God,
who not only formed with His own mysterious hands earth and water,
plants and animals, but the people also, and human society. I'm
inclined to believe that the laws come direct from Him, from His
first decalogue, and that they are inhuman because they are divine.
It must be well understood that I here consider the codes in their
principles and in their essence, without taking note of their
ridiculous diversities and their pitiable complications. The details
of customs and prescriptions, the written as well as the oral, are
man's work, and to be despised. But do not let us be afraid to
recognise that the town is a divine institution. As a result, every
government ought to be theocratic. One priest, famous for the part
he took in the declaration of 1682, M. Bossuet, was not in error,
when he wanted to form the rules of polity after the maxims of the
Scriptures; and if he has pitiably failed in this endeavour, you
have to accuse the weakness of his genius alone, which was too
narrowly attached to examples taken from the books of Judges and
Kings, without seeing that God, when He works on this world,
proportions Himself to time and space, and knows the difference
between Frenchmen and Israelites. The city established under His
true and sole legitimate authority will not be the town of Joshua,
Saul and David; it will rather be the town of the gospels, the town
of the poor, where working-man and prostitute will not be humiliated
by the Pharisee. Oh, sirs, how excellent it would be to extract from
the Scriptures a polity more beautiful and more saintly than that
which was extracted therefrom by that rocky and sterile M. Bossuet!
What a city, more harmonious than that erected by the sounds of the
lyre of Orpheus, could be built on the maxims of Jesus Christ, on
the day when His priests, no more sold to emperors and kings,
manifest themselves as the true princes of the people!"

While, standing round my good master, we listened to his discourse,
we were, without noticing it, surrounded by a troop of beggars, who,
limping, shivering, spitting, frightening the sparrows, shook their
swellings and deformities, spreading evil smells and suffocating us
with their blessings. They struggled passionately for some small
silver pieces M. d'Anquetil threw among them, fell to the ground,
and rolled in the dust.

"It's painful to look on these people," said Jahel with a sigh.

"'That pity," said M. Coignard, "suits you like a jewel,
Mademoiselle Jahel; your sighs ornament your bosom heaving under
them like a breath each of us would like to respire from your lips.
But allow me to say that such tenderness, which is not less touching
from being an interested one, troubles you inwardly by a comparison
of yonder miserable beings with yourself, and by the instinctive
idea that your young body touches, so to say, this hideous,
ulcerated and mutilated flesh, as in truth it is bound and attached
to them in as far as members of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In
consequence you cannot look on such corruption of a human body
without seeing it at the same time as a possibility of your own
body. And these wretches have shown themselves to you like prophets,
announcing that sickness and death are the lot of the family of Adam
in this world. For this very reason you sighed, mademoiselle.

"As a fact, there is not the slightest reason to believe yonder
ulcerated and verminous beggars less happy than kings and queens. It
must not be said that they are poorer, if, as it appears, that
farthing picked up by that crippled woman, and which she presses on
her heart in frantic joy, seems to her more precious than a pearl
collar is to the mistress of a prince-bishop of Cologne and
Salzburg. To really understand our spiritual and true interests we
should rather envy the life of that cripple who crawls towards us on
his hands than that of the King of France or the Emperor of Germany,
Being equal before God, they perhaps have peace in their hearts,
which the other has not, and the invaluable treasure of innocence.
But hold up your petticoats, mademoiselle, for fear that you
introduce the vermin with which I see they are covered."

Such was my good tutor's speech, and we all listened willingly.

At the distance of three leagues from Montbard, one of the harnesses
broke, and, the postboys having failed to bring rope with them, we
were detained on the road, as the place of the accident was far from
any human dwelling. My good master and M. d'Anquetil whiled away the
time by playing and sympathetic quarrels, of which they had made a
habit. While the young nobleman was surprised to see his opponent
turn up the king oftener than seemed possible by the laws of chance,
Jahel, full of emotion, asked me in a whisper if I could not see
behind us a carriage in one of the turnings of the road. Looking
back to the place she indicated, I could actually see a kind of
Gothic vehicle of a ridiculous and strange form.

"Yonder carriage," said Jahel, "stopped at the same moment as ours.
That means that we are followed. I am curious to discover the
features of the people travelling in that vehicle. I feel very
uneasy about it. Does not one of the travellers wear a very narrow
and high headgear? The carriage very much resembles the one in which
my uncle brought me, when a child, to Paris after he had killed the
Portuguese. It remained, I believe, in one of the coach-houses at
the Castle of Sablons. It really seems to be the same, of horrible
memory, because I remember my uncle in it, fuming with rage. You
cannot conceive, Jacques, how violent his hate is. I myself had to
bear his rage the day I came away. He locked me in my room and
vomited the most horrible curses on the Abbe Coignard. I shiver when
I think what his rage must have been when he found my room empty and
the sheets still attached to the window by which I left to fly with
you."

"You ought to say with M. d'Anquetil."

"How punctilious you are! Did we not depart together? Yonder
carriage torments me, it is so much like my uncle's."

"Be sure, Jahel, that it's the carriage of some honest Burgundian,
who goes about his business and does not think of us."

"You don't know," said Jahel. "I'm afraid."

"You cannot fear, however, that your uncle could run after you in
his state of decrepitude. He does not occupy himself with anything
but cabala and Hebraic dreams."

"You don't know him," she replied, and sighed. "He is occupied with
naught but myself. He loves me as much as he hates the rest of the
universe. He loves me in a manner--

"In a manner?"

"--In all the manners--in short he loves me."

"Jahel, I shudder to hear you. Good heavens: that Mosaide loves you
without that disinterestedness which is so admirable in an old man,
and so well suited for an uncle? Tell me all, Jahel-all!"

"Oh! you can tell it better than I, Jacques."

"I remain stupid. At his age, is it possible?"

"My dear friend, your skin is white, and your soul also. Everything
astonishes you. That candour is your most striking charm. You're
deceived by anyone who wants to deceive you. They make you believe
that Mosaide is a hundred and thirty years old; but he is hardly
older than sixty. They told you that for years he lived in the Great
Pyramid, but as a fact he has been a banker at Lisbon. And it
depended only on me to pass in your eyes as a Salamander."

"What, Jahel, do you tell me the truth? Your uncle--"

"Yes, and that is the secret of his jealousy. He believes the Abbe
Coignard to be his rival. He disliked him instinctively, at first
sight. But it is a great deal worse since he overheard a few words
of the conversation I had with that good abbe in the thorn bush, and
I'm sure he hates him now as the cause of my flight and my
elopement. For, after all, I've been abducted, my friend; a fact
that ought to enhance my worth in your eyes. I was certainly very
ungrateful to leave so good an uncle. But I could not endure any
longer the slavery he kept me in. And I also had an ardent wish to
become rich, and it is very natural, is it not, to wish for all the
good things when one is young and pretty? We have but one life, and
that is short enough. No one has taught me all the fine lies about
the immortality of the soul."

"Alas! Jahel," I exclaimed, in an ardour of love, provoked by her
own coolness. "Alas! I did not want anything else with you at the
Chateau des Sablons. What was wanting for your happiness?"

She made me a sign to show that M. d'Anquetil was observing us. The
harness had been repaired and our carriage rolled on again along the
road bordered on both sides by vineyards.

We stopped at Nuits to sup and to sleep. My dear tutor drank half-a-
dozen bottles of Burgundy, which warmed up his eloquence
marvellously. M. d'Anquetil kept him company, glass in hand, but to
hold his own in conversation also was a thing of which this nobleman
was not quite capable.

The meat was good, the beds were bad. M. Coignard slept in the lower
chamber, under the stairs, in the same feather bed with the host and
his wife, and all three thought they would be suffocated. M.
d'Anquetil with Jahel took the upstairs room, where the bacon and
the onions were suspended on hooks driven into the ceiling. I myself
climbed by means of a ladder to a loft and stretched out on a bundle
of straw. Being awakened by the moonlight, a ray of which fell into
my eyes, I suddenly saw Jahel in her night-cap coming through the
trap door. At a cry that I gave she put her finger to her lips.

"Hush!" she said to me, "Maurice is as drunk as a stevedore and a
marquis. He sleeps the sleep of Noah."

"Who is Maurice?" I inquired, rubbing my eyes.

"It's Anquetil. Who did you think it was?"

"Nobody, but I did not know that his name was Maurice."

"It's not long that I knew it myself, but never mind."

"You are right, Jahel, it's of no importance."

She was in her chemise, and the moonlight fell like drops of milk on
her naked shoulders. She slipped down at my side, called me by the
sweetest of names and by the most horrid of coarse names, in
whispers sounding out of her lips like heavenly murmurs. And then
she became dumb, and kissed me with the kisses she alone was able to
give, and in comparison with which the caresses of any other woman
were but an insipidity.

The constraint and the silence enhanced the furious tension of my
nerves. Surprise, the joy of revenge, and, perhaps, a somewhat
perverse jealousy inflamed my desires. The elastic firmness of her
flesh and the supple violence of the movements wherewith she
enveloped me demanded, promised, and deserved the most ardent
caresses. We became aware, during that wonderful night, of
voluptuousness the abyss of which borders on suffering.

When I came down to the innyard in the morning I met M. d'Anquetil,
who, now that I had deceived him, appeared to me less odious than
formerly. On his part he felt better inclined to me than he had yet
done since we started on our travels. He talked familiarly to me,
with sympathy and confidence; his only reproach was that I did not
show to Jahel all the regard and attention she deserved, and did not
give her the care an honest man ought to bestow on every woman.

"She complains," he said, "of your want of civility. Take care, my
dear Tournebroche; I should be sorry for a difference to arise
between her and yourself. She's a pretty girl, and loves me
immensely."

The carriage had rolled on for more than an hour when Jahel put her
head out of the coach window and said to me:

"The other carriage has reappeared. I should like to discover the
features of the two men who occupy it, but I cannot."

I replied that at such a distance, and in the morning mist, it would
be impossible to discern them.

"But," she exclaimed, "those are not faces."

"What else do you want them to be?" I questioned, and burst out
laughing.

Now, in her turn, she inquired of me what silly idea had sprung into
my brain to laugh so stupidly and said:

"They are not faces, they are masks. Yonder two men follow us and
are masked."

I informed M. d'Anquetil that seemingly an ugly carriage followed
us. But he asked me to let him alone.

"If all the hundred thousand devils were on our track," he
exclaimed, "I should not care a rap for it as I have enough to do to
look after that obese old abbe who plays his tricks with the cards
in the most artful way, and who robs me of my money. I almost
suspect, Tournebroche, you call my attention to yonder coach for the
purpose of aiding and abetting that old sharper. Cannot a carriage
be on the same road as ours without causing you anxiety?"

Jahel whispered to me:

"I predict, Jacques, that yonder carriage brings trouble for us. I
have a presentiment of it, and my presentiments have never failed to
come true."

"Do you want to make me believe that you have the gift of prophecy?"

Gravely, she replied:

"Yes; I have."

"What, you are a prophetess!" I cried, smiling. "Here is something
strange!"

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