“We’ll build a raft!” he cried.
No sooner had those words been spoken than everyone sped off as one toward the ruined bridge. A mob set about gathering iron clamps, hunting for pieces of wood, for ropes, for everything required to construct a raft. Under the major’s command, some twenty armed soldiers and officers stood guard, protecting the workers against any attack the crowd might launch on realizing their intentions. An imprisoned man’s yearning for freedom can sometimes energize him and inspire him to miraculous feats, but that is as nothing next to the need compelling these pitiable Frenchmen to act.
“The Russians! The Russians are on their way!” the guards warned the workers.
And the wood creaked and groaned, the vessel grew wider, higher, deeper. Generals, soldiers, colonels, everyone helped to transport wheels, iron bars, ropes, and planks, bowing under their weight: It was a living image of the building of Noah’s ark. Beside her husband, the young countess gazed on this spectacle, regretting her inability to take part in the labors; nevertheless, she helped to tie knots to strengthen the rigging. Finally the raft was finished. Forty men heaved it into the water, a dozen soldiers holding the ropes that moored it to the bank. Seeing their craft afloat on the Berezina, the builders immediately leapt aboard, a loathsome spirit of self-interest animating them all. The major had foreseen that the first surge would be violent, and so clasped Stéphanie and the general by the hand to hold them back, but a shiver ran through him when he saw the vessel packed from one end to the other, the passengers pressed together like spectators on the parterre of a theater.
“Savages!” he cried. “It was I who gave you the idea of building a raft; I saved your lives, and you refuse to leave room for me.”
A muddled tumult of voices was the only response. By means of long poles braced against the riverbank, a group of men on the raft were preparing to cast off with one mighty thrust, hoping to propel it straight toward the other bank, cutting through the corpses and floating ice.
“By thunder! I’ll toss you overboard right enough, if you don’t make way for the major and his two friends,” cried the grenadier, raising his saber to halt the launch, and—braving awful bellows of fury—forcing those on board to further close ranks.
“I’m going to fall! I’m falling!” came the cries of his companions. “Push off! Forward!”
The major looked dry-eyed at his mistress, who gazed toward the heavens in sublime resignation.
“Better to die with you!” she said.
There was something comical in the situation of the raft’s passengers. Rage though they might, none dared disobey the grenadier, for they were pressed together so tightly that to jostle one would be to topple them all. Faced with this threat, a captain resolved to be rid of the troublesome soldier. Sensing the officer’s hostile intentions, the grenadier seized him and flung him into the water, saying, “Ah! Ah, ducky, so you want a drink? Be my guest! Room for two more!” he cried. “Come along, Major, toss that little woman this way and get yourself over here! Leave the dotard where he is, he’ll be dead by tomorrow.”
“Hurry!” roared a voice composed of a hundred voices.
“Come along now, Major! These people are getting itchy, and I don’t believe you can blame them.”
The Comte de Vandières threw off his coverings and stood on the bank, displaying his general’s uniform.
“We must save the count,” said Philippe.
Stéphanie squeezed her lover’s hand, threw herself on his neck, and embraced him with a fearsome intensity.
“Adieu!” she said.
They had understood each other perfectly. The Comte de Vandières found the strength and presence of mind to leap onto the craft. Stéphanie followed, after casting Philippe one last glance.
“Major, would you like my place?” shouted the grenadier. “Life’s nothing to me. I’ve neither wife nor child nor mother.”
“I’m leaving these two in your care,” cried the major, pointing toward the count and his wife.
“Don’t you worry, I’ll look after them like my own flesh and blood.”
Philippe stood still, watching. The raft was propelled toward the opposite bank with such force that when it touched ground a mighty shudder ran through it from one end to the other. The count tumbled into the river; as he fell, a sheet of ice sheared off his head and launched it far into the distance, like a cannonball.
“What did I tell you, Major?” cried the grenadier.
“Adieu!” cried a woman.
Philippe de Sucy fell to his knees, frozen with horror, defeated by the cold, by regret, by exhaustion.
* * *
“My poor niece’s mind was destroyed,” added the doctor after a moment of silence. “Ah! monsieur,” he went on, clasping d’Albon’s hand, “how cruel life has been to that fragile woman, so young and so delicate! Separated by an appalling misfortune from the grenadier, a man by the name of Fleuriot, for two years she had no choice but to follow after the army, a plaything for a bunch of ruffians. As I understand it, she had no shoes to wear, only the most meager dress, went for months with no one caring for her or feeding her; now sheltered in a charity house, now chased away like an animal. God alone knows what miseries that poor woman nevertheless survived. She was locked up with the mad folk in a small German town, and meanwhile her family, thinking her dead, was dividing her legacy. In 1816 Grenadier Fleuriot recognized her in a Strasbourg inn, not long after she’d escaped from her prison. The local peasants told him the countess had been living in the forest for an entire month, that they’d tracked her like an animal, hoping to capture her, but in vain. I was then staying a few leagues from Strasbourg. Hearing tell of a wild girl, I was curious to discover the truth of these ridiculous tales. What a shock when I found the countess before me! Fleuriot told me all he knew of that terrible story. I brought the poor man back to the Auvergne with my niece, and there I had the misfortune of losing him. He had a kind of power over Madame de Vandières. He alone could persuade her to dress. Only rarely, in the beginning, did she utter that word Adieu!, which constitutes the whole of her language. Fleuriot did all he could to reawaken her mind, but he failed, and succeeded only in making her speak that sad word a little more often. The grenadier had a gift for distracting her, for occupying her with play, and through him, I hoped, but . . .”
For a moment Stéphanie’s uncle sat silent.
“Here,” he resumed, “she found another creature, whose company seems to suit her: An idiot peasant girl, who, ugly and backward as she is, was once in love with a mason. This mason wanted to marry her, for she owns a bit of land. For a year, poor Geneviève was the happiest woman there had ever been on the face of this earth. She looked after herself, and on Sundays went off to dance with Dallot; she knew love; there was a place in her heart and her mind for emotion. But Dallot had second thoughts. He found a girl still possessed of her wits, and of more land than Geneviève, and so he left her. The poor thing lost what little intelligence love had inspired in her, and now she can only herd cows or gather hay. She and my niece are, in a sense, bound together by the invisible chain of their shared fate and by the sentiment that was the cause of their madness. Come and see for yourself,” said Stéphanie’s uncle, leading the Marquis d’Albon to the window.
And the magistrate did indeed see the pretty countess sitting on the ground between Geneviève’s legs. Armed with a huge tortoiseshell comb, the peasant girl was devoting all her attention to untangling Stéphanie’s long black hair. The countess sat patiently, now and then letting out a stifled cry whose tone betrayed a purely instinctual pleasure. Monsieur d’Albon shivered as he contemplated the countess’s unguarded pose, her animal carelessness, the signs of an utter absence of soul.
“Philippe! Philippe!” he cried. “Yesterday’s sorrows are as nothing. Is there no hope, then?”
The old doctor looked heavenward.
“Adieu, monsieur,” said Monsieur d’Albon, pressing the old man’s hand. “My friend is wa
iting. You shall meet him soon.”
“So it truly is her,” cried Sucy after the Marquis d’Albon had spoken a few words. “Ah, I still had my doubts!” he added, tears falling from his dark eyes, usually so severe.
“It is indeed the Countess de Vandières,” rejoined the magistrate.
The colonel leapt out of bed and threw on some clothes.
“Now hold on, Philippe!” said the magistrate, aghast. “Are you out of your mind?”
“But I’m not ill anymore,” the colonel answered, plainly. “This news has vanquished all my miseries. What ailment could possibly hope to compete with thoughts of Stéphanie? I’m off to Bons-Hommes, I’ll see her, I’ll talk to her, I’ll cure her! She’s a free woman. And joy will be ours, or there is no such thing as Providence. Do you really believe that poor woman can hear my voice and not recover her reason?”
“She’s already seen you and not recognized you,” the magistrate gently replied, noting his friend’s overly high hopes and eager to sow a few salutary doubts.
The colonel winced slightly on hearing those words, but soon his smile returned, and he brushed them aside with a quick wave. No one dared stand in his way. A few hours later he had settled into the former priory with the doctor and the Comtesse de Vandières.
“Where is she?” he cried as he entered.
“Shh!” answered Stéphanie’s uncle. “She’s asleep. Look, here she is.”
Philippe saw the poor madwoman huddled on a bench in the sun. Her head was shaded from the heat by a forest of unkempt hair draped over her face; her arms hung elegantly groundward; her body had a doe’s delicate grace; her feet were effortlessly tucked beneath her; her breast rose at regular intervals; her skin displayed that porcelain whiteness for which we admire the limpid faces of children. Motionless beside her, Geneviève held a small branch that Stéphanie must have snapped from the very top of a poplar, and she gently waved it over her dozing friend to chase off the flies and cool the air. The peasant girl looked at Monsieur Fanjat and the colonel; then, like an animal recognizing its master, she slowly turned back to the countess and went on watching over her, never showing the slightest sign of surprise or intelligence. It was a stifling hot day. The stone bench seemed to sparkle, and from the meadow rose those mischievous vapors that flutter and shimmer like gold dust over grass, but Geneviève seemed oblivious to the consuming heat. The colonel violently clasped the doctor’s hands. Tears rolled down the soldier’s virile cheeks and fell into the grass at Stéphanie’s feet.
“Monsieur,” said the uncle, “for two years my heart has broken every day. Soon you will be exactly like me. You may not weep, but you will feel your grief all the same.”
“You’ve looked after her,” said the colonel, equal parts gratitude and jealousy in his eyes.
These two men understood each other. Again clasping hands, they stood motionless, contemplating the wonderful tranquillity that sleep had draped over the charming creature before them. Now and then Stéphanie sighed, and that sigh, which had every appearance of sensibility, left the poor colonel trembling with joy.
“Alas,” Monsieur Fanjat said gently, “do not be fooled, monsieur. You see her now as full of reason as she will ever be.”
Those who have spent hours looking on in delight as a loved one lies slumbering, someone whose eyes will smile at them on awakening, must surely understand the sweet, terrible emotion that now gripped the colonel. Here that sleep was an illusion; her awakening would be a death, and the most horrible of all deaths. Suddenly a young goat came bounding to the bench and sniffed at Stéphanie. Roused by the sound, she lightly rose to her feet, inspiring no alarm in the impulsive animal, but on spotting Philippe she fled to the cover of an elderberry hedge, her four-legged companion at her heels; then she threw out the small birdlike cry that the colonel had heard near the fence when the countess first appeared to d’Albon. Finally she climbed into a laburnum tree, perched among its green boughs, and peered at the “stranger” as intently as the forest’s most curious nightingale.
“Adieu, adieu, adieu!” she said, her tone unmarked by any trace of intelligence.
It was the indifference of a bird whistling its song.
“She doesn’t know me!” cried the colonel, despairing. “Stéphanie! It’s Philippe, your Philippe, Philippe.”
And the poor soldier strode toward the tree. When he was three paces away, the countess shot him a glance as if to challenge him, though with a sort of fright in her eyes; then, in one leap, she fled from the laburnum to a locust tree, and from there to a Norway spruce, where she swung from branch to branch with an incredible agility.
“Don’t chase after her,” Monsieur Fanjat told the colonel. “You would create an aversion that may well become insurmountable. I’ll help you to make yourself known to her and to tame her. Come to this bench. Pay the poor creature no mind, and you’ll soon find her creeping your way, ever so slowly, to examine you.”
“For her of all people not to recognize me, to flee me!” the colonel repeated, sitting down with his back against a tree whose boughs shaded a rustic bench, and he bowed his head over his breast. The doctor said nothing. Soon the countess nimbly climbed down from her spruce tree, flitting this way and that like a will-o’-the-wisp, sometimes swaying with the undulations of the wind-tossed boughs. On each branch she paused to peer at the stranger, but at last, seeing him so still, she dropped onto the grass, stood, and slowly stole toward him through the meadow. She stopped at a tree some ten feet from the bench, and Monsieur Fanjat quietly said to the colonel, “Carefully reach into my right-hand pocket and take out a few lumps of sugar. Show them to her, and she’ll come to you. For you, I will gladly forgo the pleasure of giving her these sweets myself. She loves sugar with a passion; you’ll soon have her approaching you and recognizing you without the slightest hesitation.”
“When she was a woman,” Philippe answered sadly, “she had no taste for sweets.”
The colonel clasped the lump of sugar between his right thumb and index finger and proffered it to Stéphanie, who once again let out her savage cry, bounding eagerly toward Philippe, then stopped, thwarted by the instinctive fear he aroused in her. Again and again, she looked at the sugar and then looked away, like those poor dogs whose masters forbid them to touch a morsel of food until, after a drawn-out recitation, the last letter of the alphabet has been spoken. Finally animal passion triumphed over fear; Stéphanie leapt toward Philippe, timidly put out her brown hand to seize her quarry, touched her lover’s fingers, clutched the sugar, and vanished into a thicket. This devastating spectacle left the colonel deeply forlorn. He dissolved into tears and fled into the drawing room.
“Is love then less courageous than friendship?” Monsieur Fanjat asked him. “Monsieur le baron, I have hope. My poor niece’s condition was once far more dire than this.”
“Is such a thing possible?” Philippe cried.
“She went about naked.”
The colonel made a gesture of horror and paled; thinking he glimpsed certain disturbing symptoms in that pallor, the doctor came and took his pulse, and found him in the grips of a violent fever. At his unyielding insistence, the colonel was put to bed, while the doctor prepared a mild dose of opium to ensure him a restful sleep.
Some eight days went by, the Baron de Sucy continually tortured by fits of mortal anguish; soon his eyes had no tears left to shed. So often shattered, his soul could not inure itself to the spectacle of the countess’s madness, but he made his peace, so to speak, with this cruel state of affairs and found moments of relief in his sorrow. His heroism knew no bounds. He found the courage to tame Stéphanie with offers of sweetmeats; he devoted so much thought to this ritual, he so skillfully calibrated each modest new step toward the conquest of his mistress’s instinct—the last lingering shred of her intelligence—that she was soon more at home here than ever before. Every morning, on rising, the colonel hurried down to the garden, and if, after a long search for the countess, he could not guess in
what tree she was gently swaying, or in what corner she had nestled to play with a bird, or on what roof she was perched, he had only to whistle the well-known air “Partant pour la Syrie,” to which the memory of an episode from their love affair was attached. Immediately Stéphanie came running, light as a fawn. She had grown used to the sight of the colonel, and he no longer frightened her; soon she took to sitting on his knees, encircling him with her lithe, slender arm. In this position, so dear to lovers, Philippe slowly offered the greedy countess a few sweets. Sometimes, when she had eaten them all, she searched through his pockets, her gestures as mechanically purposeful as a monkey’s. Once she was satisfied that there was nothing more to be had, she looked at Philippe with an empty gaze, devoid of thought or recognition, and began to play with him; she tried to take off his boots to see his foot, she ripped his gloves, donned his hat; but she passively allowed him to run his hands through her hair, let him take her in his arms, and received ardent kisses without pleasure. When his tears flowed, she stared at him in silence; the whistling of “Partant pour la Syrie” she understood perfectly, but he could not make her speak her own name: Stéphanie. In all these heartbreaking endeavors, Philippe was buoyed by a hope that never deserted him. If, on a beautiful fall morning, he saw the countess peacefully sitting on a bench beneath a yellowing poplar, the pitiable lover lay down at her feet and gazed into her eyes as long as she would allow it, hoping to spy in them some new glimmer of lucidity; sometimes he fell prey to illusion and believed he had glimpsed a vibrancy in their hard, immobile gleam, a softening, a liveliness, and he cried out: “Stéphanie! Stéphanie! You can hear me, you can see me!” But she listened to the sound of that voice as she would to a noise, to the wind rustling the leaves, to the lowing of the cow on whose back she liked to clamber; and the colonel wrung his hands in despair, a despair whose sting never waned. His sorrow only grew with the passage of time and these pointless, repeated attempts. One evening, beneath a tranquil sky, in the silence and calm of that bucolic haven, the doctor glanced at the couple and saw the baron loading a pistol. The old physician understood that Philippe had given up hope; instantly the blood drained from his face, leaving him light-headed and weak, and if he succeeded in overcoming that impairment it was because he preferred his niece mad and living to dead. He came running.