Adieu

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Adieu


"Love," he said, kissing her hands passionately, "I am Philippe."

She looked at him with curiosity.

"Come," he said, pressing her to him, "dost thou feel my heart? It has
beaten for thee alone. I love thee ever. Philippe is not dead; he is
not dead, thou art on him, in his arms. Thou art MY Stephanie; I am
thy Philippe."

"Adieu," she said, "adieu."

The colonel quivered, for he fancied he saw his own excitement
communicated to his mistress. His heart-rending cry, drawn from him by
despair, that last effort of an eternal love, of a delirious passion,
was successful, the mind of his darling was awaking.

"Ah! Stephanie! Stephanie! we shall yet be happy."

She gave a cry of satisfaction, and her eyes brightened with a flash
of vague intelligence.

"She knows me!--Stephanie!"

His heart swelled; his eyelids were wet with tears. Then, suddenly,
the countess showed him a bit of sugar she had found in his pocket
while he was speaking to her. He had mistaken for human thought the
amount of reason required for a monkey's trick. Philippe dropped to
the ground unconscious. Monsieur Fanjat found the countess sitting on
the colonel's body. She was biting her sugar, and testifying her
pleasure by pretty gestures and affectations with which, had she her
reason, she might have imitated her parrot or her cat.

"Ah! my friend," said Philippe, when he came to his senses, "I die
every day, every moment! I love too well! I could still bear all, if,
in her madness, she had kept her woman's nature. But to see her always
a savage, devoid even of modesty, to see her--"

"You want opera madness, do you? something picturesque and pleasing,"
said the doctor, bitterly. "Your love and your devotion yield before a
prejudice. Monsieur, I have deprived myself for your sake of the sad
happiness of watching over my niece; I have left to you the pleasure
of playing with her; I have kept for myself the heaviest cares. While
you have slept, I have watched, I have-- Go, monsieur, go! abandon
her! leave this sad refuge. I know how to live with that dear darling
creature; I comprehend her madness, I watch her gestures, I know her
secrets. Some day you will thank me for thus sending you away."

The colonel left the old monastery, never to return but once. The
doctor was horrified when he saw the effect he had produced upon his
guest, whom he now began to love when he saw him thus. Surely, if
either of the two lovers were worthy of pity, it was Philippe; did he
not bear alone the burden of their dreadful sorrow?

After the colonel's departure the doctor kept himself informed about
him; he learned that the miserable man was living on an estate near
Saint-Germain. In truth, the baron, on the faith of a dream, had
formed a project which he believed would yet restore the mind of his
darling. Unknown to the doctor, he spent the rest of the autumn in
preparing for his enterprise. A little river flowed through his park
and inundated during the winter the marshes on either side of it,
giving it some resemblance to the Beresina. The village of Satout, on
the heights above, closed in, like Studzianka, the scene of horror.
The colonel collected workmen to deepen the banks, and by the help of
his memory, he copied in his park the shore where General Eble
destroyed the bridge. He planted piles, and made buttresses and burned
them, leaving their charred and blackened ruins, standing in the water
from shore to shore. Then he gathered fragments of all kinds, like
those of which the raft was built. He ordered dilapidated uniforms and
clothing of every grade, and hired hundreds of peasants to wear them;
he erected huts and cabins for the purpose of burning them. In short,
he forgot nothing that might recall that most awful of all scenes, and
he succeeded.

Toward the last of December, when the snow had covered with its thick,
white mantle all his imitative preparations, he recognized the
Beresina. This false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of
his army comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once.
Monsieur de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic
imitation, which was talked of in several Parisian circles as a proof
of insanity.

Early in January, 1820, the colonel drove in a carriage, the very
counterpart of the one in which he had driven the Comte and Comtesse
de Vandieres from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses, too, were like
those he had gone, at the peril of his life, to fetch from the Russian
outposts. He himself wore the soiled fantastic clothing, the same
weapons, as on the 29th of November, 1812. He had let his beard grow,
also his hair, which was tangled and matted, and his face was
neglected, so that nothing might be wanting to represent the awful
truth.

"I can guess your purpose," cried Monsieur Fanjat, when he saw the
colonel getting out of the carriage. "If you want to succeed, do not
let my niece see you in that equipage. To-night I will give her opium.
During her sleep, we will dress her as she was at Studzianka, and
place her in the carriage. I will follow you in another vehicle."

About two in the morning, the sleeping countess was placed in the
carriage and wrapped in heavy coverings. A few peasants with torches
lighted up this strange abduction. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke the
silence of the night. Philippe and the doctor turned, and saw
Genevieve coming half-naked from the ground-floor room in which she
slept.

"Adieu, adieu! all is over, adieu!" she cried, weeping hot tears.

"Genevieve, what troubles you?" asked the doctor.

Genevieve shook her head with a motion of despair, raised her arm to
heaven, looked at the carriage, uttering a long-drawn moan with every
sign of the utmost terror; then she returned to her room silently.

"That is a good omen!" cried the colonel. "She feels she is to lose
her companion. Perhaps she SEES that Stephanie will recover her
reason."

"God grant it!" said Monsieur Fanjat, who himself was affected by the
incident.

Ever since he had made a close study of insanity, the good man had met
with many examples of the prophetic faculty and the gift of second
sight, proofs of which are frequently given by alienated minds, and
which may also be found, so travellers say, among certain tribes of
savages.

As the colonel had calculated, Stephanie crossed the fictitious plain
of the Beresina at nine o'clock in the morning, when she was awakened
by a cannon shot not a hundred yards from the spot where the
experiment was to be tried. This was a signal. Hundreds of peasants
made a frightful clamor like that on the shore of the river that
memorable night, when twenty thousand stragglers were doomed to death
or slavery by their own folly.

At the cry, at the shot, the countess sprang from the carriage, and
ran, with delirious emotion, over the snow to the banks of the river;
she saw the burned bivouacs and the charred remains of the bridge, and
the fatal raft, which the men were launching into the icy waters of
the Beresina. The major, Philippe, was there, striking back the crowd
with his sabre. Madame de Vandieres gave a cry, which went to all
hearts, and threw herself before the colonel, whose heart beat wildly.
She seemed to gather herself together, and, at first, looked vaguely
at the singular scene. For an instant, as rapid as the lightning's
flash, her eyes had that lucidity, devoid of mind, which we admire in
the eye of birds; then passing her hand across her brow with the keen
expression of one who meditates, she contemplated the living memory of
a past scene spread before her, and, turning quickly to Philippe, she
SAW HIM. An awful silence reigned in the crowd. The colonel gasped,
but dared not speak; the doctor wept. Stephanie's sweet face colored
faintly; then, from tint to tint, it returned to the brightness of
youth, till it glowed with a beautiful crimson. Life and happiness,
lighted by intelligence, came nearer and nearer like a conflagration.
Convulsive trembling rose from her feet to her heart. Then these
phenomena seemed to blend in one as Stephanie's eyes cast forth a
celestial ray, the flame of a living soul. She lived, she thought! She
shuddered, with fear perhaps, for God himself unloosed that silent
tongue, and cast anew His fires into that long-extinguished soul.
Human will came with its full electric torrent, and vivified the body
from which it had been driven.

"Stephanie!" cried the colonel.

"Oh! it is Philippe," said the poor countess.

She threw herself into the trembling arms that the colonel held out to
her, and the clasp of the lovers frightened the spectators. Stephanie
burst into tears. Suddenly her tears stopped, she stiffened as though
the lightning had touched her, and said in a feeble voice,--

"Adieu, Philippe; I love thee, adieu!"

"Oh! she is dead," cried the colonel, opening his arms.

The old doctor received the inanimate body of his niece, kissed it as
though he were a young man, and carrying it aside, sat down with it
still in his arms on a pile of wood. He looked at the countess and
placed his feeble trembling hand upon her heart. That heart no longer
beat.

"It is true," he said, looking up at the colonel, who stood
motionless, and then at Stephanie, on whom death was placing that
resplendent beauty, that fugitive halo, which is, perhaps, a pledge of
the glorious future--"Yes, she is dead."

"Ah! that smile," cried Philippe, "do you see that smile? Can it be
true?"

"She is turning cold," replied Monsieur Fanjat.

Monsieur de Sucy made a few steps to tear himself away from the sight;
but he stopped, whistled the air that Stephanie had known, and when
she did not come to him, went on with staggering steps like a drunken
man, still whistling, but never turning back.

General Philippe de Sucy was thought in the social world to be a very
agreeable man, and above all a very gay one. A few days ago, a lady
complimented him on his good humor, and the charming equability of his
nature.

"Ah! madame," he said, "I pay dear for my liveliness in my lonely
evenings."

"Are you ever alone?" she said.

"No," he replied smiling.

If a judicious observer of human nature could have seen at that moment
the expression on the Comte de Sucy's face, he would perhaps have
shuddered.

"Why don't you marry?" said the lady, who had several daughters at
school. "You are rich, titled, and of ancient lineage; you have
talents, and a great future before you; all things smile upon you."

"Yes," he said, "but a smile kills me."

The next day the lady heard with great astonishment that Monsieur de
Sucy had blown his brains out during the night. The upper ranks of
society talked in various ways over this extraordinary event, and each
person looked for the cause of it. According to the proclivities of
each reasoner, play, love, ambition, hidden disorders, and vices,
explained the catastrophe, the last scene of a drama begun in 1812.
Two men alone, a marquis and former deputy, and an aged physician,
knew that Philippe de Sucy was one of those strong men to whom God has
given the unhappy power of issuing daily in triumph from awful combats
which they fight with an unseen monster. If, for a moment, God
withdraws from such men His all-powerful hand, they succumb.




ADDENDUM

The following personage appears in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Note: Adieu is also entitled Farewell.

Granville, Vicomte de
The Gondreville Mystery
A Second Home
Farewell (Adieu)
Cesar Birotteau
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
A Daughter of Eve
Cousin Pons