Ги де Мопассан
The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 3
BERTHA
My old friend (one has friends occasionally who are much older than oneself), my old friend Doctor Bonnet, had often invited me to spend some time with him at Riom, and as I did not know Auvergne, I made up my mind to go in the summer of 1876.
I got there by the morning train, and the first person I saw on the platform was the doctor. He was dressed in a gray suit, and wore a soft, black, wide-brimmed, high-crowned felt hat, which was narrow at the top like a chimney pot, a hat which hardly any one except an Auvergnat would wear, and which smacked of the charcoal burner. Dressed like that, the doctor had the appearance of an old young man, with his spare body under his thin coat, and his large head covered with white hair.
He embraced me with that evident pleasure which country people feel when they meet long-expected friends, and stretching out his arm, he said proudly:
"This is Auvergne!" I saw nothing except a range of mountains before me, whose summits, which resembled truncated cones, must have been extinct volcanoes.
Then, pointing to the name of the station, he said:
"Riom, the fatherland of magistrates, the pride of the magistracy, and which ought rather to be the fatherland of doctors."
"Why?" I asked.
"Why?" he replied with a laugh. "If you transpose the letters, you have the Latin word mori, to die… That is the reason why I settled here, my young friend."
And delighted at his own joke, he carried me off, rubbing his hands.
As soon as I had swallowed a cup of coffee, he made me go and see the town. I admired the chemist's house, and the other celebrated houses, which were all black, but as pretty as knick-nacks, with façades of sculptured stone. I admired the statue of the Virgin, the patroness of butchers, and he told me an amusing story about this, which I will relate some other time, and then Doctor Bonnet said to me:
"I must beg you to excuse me for a few minutes while I go and see a patient, and then I will take you to Chatel-Guyon, so as to show you the general aspect of the town, and all the mountain chain of the Puy-de-Dôme, before lunch. You can wait for me outside; I shall only go upstairs and come down immediately."
He left me outside one of those old, gloomy, silent, melancholy houses, which one sees in the provinces, and this one appeared to look particularly sinister, and I soon discovered the reason. All the large windows on the first floor were half boarded up with wooden shutters. The upper part of them alone could be opened, as if one had wished to prevent the people who were locked up in that huge stone trunk from looking into the street.
When the doctor came down again, I told him how it had struck me, and he replied:
"You are quite right; the poor creature who is living there must never see what is going on outside. She is a mad woman, or rather an idiot, what you Normans would call a Niente8. It is a miserable story, but a very singular pathological case at the same time. Shall I tell you?"
I begged him to do so, and he continued:
"Twenty years ago, the owners of this house, who were my patients, had a daughter who was like all other girls, but I soon discovered that while her body became admirably developed, her intellect remained stationary.
"She began to walk very early, but she could not talk. At first I thought she was deaf, but I soon discovered that although she heard perfectly, she did not understand anything that was said to her. Violent noises made her start and frightened her, without her understanding how they were caused.
"She grew up into a superb woman, but she was dumb, from an absolute want of intellect. I tried all means to introduce a gleam of sense into her head, but nothing succeeded. I thought that I noticed that she knew her nurse, though as soon as she was weaned, she failed to recognize her mother. She could never pronounce that word, which is the first that children utter, and the last which soldiers murmur when they are dying on the field of battle. She sometimes tried to talk, but she produced nothing but incoherent sounds.
"When the weather was fine, she laughed continually, and emitted some low cries which might be compared to the twittering of birds; when it rained she cried and moaned in a mournful, terrifying manner, which sounded like the howling of a dog when a death occurs in a house.
"She was fond of rolling on the grass, like young animals do, and of running about madly, and she used to clap her hands every morning, when the sun shone into her room, and would jump out of bed and insist by signs, on being dressed as quickly as possible, so that she might get out.
"She did not appear to distinguish between people, between her mother and her nurse, or between her father and me, or between the coachman and the cook. I liked her parents, who were very unhappy on her account, very much, and went to see them nearly every day. I dined with them tolerably frequently, which enabled me to remark that Bertha (they had called her Bertha), seemed to recognize the various dishes, and to prefer some to others. At that time she was twelve years old, but as fully formed in figure as a girl of eighteen, and taller than I was. Then, the idea struck me of developing her greediness, and by these means to try and produce some slight powers of distinguishing into her mind, and to force her, by the diversity of flavors, if not to reason, at any rate to arrive at instinctive distinctions, which would of themselves constitute a species of work that was material to thought. Later on, by appealing to her passions, and by carefully making use of those which could serve us, we might hope to obtain a kind of reaction on her intellect, and by degrees increase the insensible action of her brain.
"One day I put two plates before her, one of soup, and the other of very sweet vanilla cream. I made her taste each of them successively, and then I let her choose for herself, and she ate the plate of cream. In a short time I made her very greedy, so greedy that it appeared as if the only idea she had in her head was the desire for eating. She perfectly recognized the various dishes, and stretched out her hands towards those that she liked, and took hold of them eagerly, and she used to cry when they were taken from her. Then I thought I would try and teach her to come to the dining room when the dinner bell rang. It took a long time, but I succeeded in the end. In her vacant intellect, there was a fixed correlation between the sound and her taste, a correspondence between two senses, an appeal from one to the other, and consequently a sort of connection of ideas – if one can call that kind of instinctive hyphen between two organic functions an idea – and so I carried my experiments further, and taught her, with much difficulty, to recognize meal times on the face of the clock.
"It was impossible for me for a long time to attract her attention to the hands, but I succeeded in making her remark the clockwork and the striking apparatus. The means I employed were very simple; I asked them not to have the bell rung for lunch, and everybody got up and went into the dining room, when the little brass hammer struck twelve o'clock, but I found great difficulty in making her learn to count the strokes. She ran to the door each time she heard the clock strike, but by degrees she learned that all the strokes had not the same value as far as regarded meals, and she frequently fixed her eyes, guided by her ears, on the dial of the clock.
"When I noticed that, I took care, every day at twelve and at six o'clock to place my fingers on the figures twelve and six, as soon as the moment she was waiting for, had arrived, and I soon noticed that she attentively followed the motion of the small brass hands, which I had often turned in her presence.
"She had understood! Perhaps I ought rather to say that she had seized the idea. I had succeeded in getting the knowledge, or rather the sensation of the time into her, just as is the case with carp, who certainly have no clocks, when they are fed every day exactly at the same time.
"When once I had obtained that result, all the clocks and watches in the house occupied her attention almost exclusively. She spent her time in looking at them, in listening to them and in waiting for meal times, and once something very funny happened. The striking apparatus of a pretty little Louis XVI. clock that hung at the head of her bed, having got out of order, she noticed it. She sat for twenty minutes, with her eyes on the hands, waiting for it to strike ten, but when the hand passed the figure, she was astonished at not hearing anything; so stupefied was she, indeed, that she sat down, no doubt overwhelmed by a feeling of violent emotion, such as attacks us in the face of some terrible catastrophe. And she had the wonderful patience to wait until eleven o'clock, in order to see what would happen, and as she naturally heard nothing, she was suddenly either seized with a wild fit of rage at having been deceived, and imposed upon by appearances, or else overcome by that fear which some frightened creature feels at some terrible mystery, and by the furious impatience of a passionate individual who meets with some obstacle, she took up the tongs from the fireplace and struck the clock so violently that she broke it to pieces in a moment.
"It was evident, therefore, that her brain did act and calculate, obscurely it is true, and within very restricted limits, for I could never succeed in making her distinguish persons as she distinguished the time; and to stir her intellect, it was necessary to appeal to her passions, in the material sense of the word, and we soon had another, and alas! a very terrible proof of this!"
"She had grown up into a splendid girl; a perfect type of a race, a sort of lovely and stupid Venus. She was sixteen, and I have rarely seen such perfection of form, such suppleness and such regular features. I said she was a Venus; yes, a fair, stout, vigorous Venus, with large, bright, vacant eyes, which were as blue as the flowers of the flax plant; she had a large mouth with full lips, the mouth of a glutton, of a sensualist, a mouth made for kisses. Well, one morning her father came into my consulting room, with a strange look on his face, and, sitting down, without even replying to my greeting, he said:
"'I want to speak to you about a very serious matter… Would it be possible … would it be possible for Bertha to marry?'
"'Bertha to marry!.. Why, it is quite impossible!'
"'Yes, I know, I know,' he replied… 'But reflect, Doctor … don't you think … perhaps … we hoped … if she had children … it would be a great shock to her, but a great happiness, and … who knows whether maternity might not rouse her intellect…?'
"I was in a state of great perplexity. He was right, and it was possible that such a new situation, and that wonderful instinct of maternity which beats in the hearts of the lower animals, as it does in the heart of a woman, which makes the hen fly at a dog's jaws to defend her chickens, might bring about a revolution, an utter change in her vacant mind, and set the motionless mechanism of her thoughts into movement. And then, moreover, I immediately remembered a personal instance. Some years previously I had possessed a spaniel bitch who was so stupid that I could do nothing with her, but when she had had pups she became, if not exactly intelligent, yet almost like many other dogs who have not been thoroughly broken.
"As soon as I foresaw the possibility of this, the wish to get Bertha married grew in me, not so much out of friendship for her and her poor parents, as from scientific curiosity. What would happen? It was a singular problem, and I said to her father:
"'Perhaps you are right … You might make the attempt … but … but you will never find a man to consent to marry her.'
"'I have found somebody,' he said in a low voice.
"I was dumbfounded, and said: 'Somebody really suitable? … Some one of your own rank and position in society?'
"'Decidedly,' he replied.
"'Oh! And may I ask his name?'
"'I came on purpose to tell you, and to consult you. It is Monsieur Gaston du Boys de Lucelles.'
"I felt inclined to exclaim: 'What a wretch,' but I held my tongue, and after a few moments' silence, I said:
"'Oh! Very good. I see nothing against it.'
"The poor man shook me heartily by the hand.
"'She is to be married next month,' he said."
"Monsieur Gaston du Boys de Lucelles was a scape-grace of good family, who, after having spent all that he had inherited from his father, and having incurred debts by all kinds of doubtful means, had been trying to discover some other way of obtaining money, and he had discovered this method. He was a good-looking young fellow, and in capital health, but fast; one of those odious race of provincial fast men, and he appeared to me to be a sufficient sort of a husband, who could be got rid of later, by making him an allowance. He came to the house to pay his addresses, and to strut about before the idiot girl, who, however, seemed to please him. He brought her flowers, kissed her hands, sat at her feet and looked at her with affectionate eyes; but she took no notice of any of his attentions, and did not make any distinction between him and the other persons who were about her.
"However, the marriage took place, and you may guess how excited my curiosity was. I went to see Bertha the next day, to try and discover from her looks whether any feelings had been roused in her, but I found her just the same as she was every day, wholly taken up with the clock and dinner, while he, on the contrary, appeared really in love, and tried to rouse his wife's spirits and affections by little endearments, and such caresses as one bestows on a kitten. He could think of nothing better.
"I called upon the married couple pretty frequently, and I soon perceived that the young woman knew her husband, and gave him those eager looks which she had hitherto bestowed only on sweet dishes.
"She followed his movements, knew his step on the stairs or in the neighboring rooms, clapped her hands when he came in, and her face was changed, and brightened by the flames of profound happiness, and of desire.
"She loved him with her whole body, and with all her soul, to the very depths of her poor, weak soul, and with all her heart, that poor heart of some grateful animal. It was really a delightful and innocent picture of simple passion, of carnal and yet modest passion, such as nature had implanted into mankind, before man had complicated and disfigured it, by all the various shades of sentiment. But he soon grew tired of this ardent, beautiful, dumb creature, and did not spend more than an hour a day with her, thinking it sufficient to devote his rights to her, and she began to suffer in consequence. She used to wait for him from morning till night, with her eyes on the clock; she did not even look after the meals now, for he took all his away from home, Clermont, Chatel-Guyon, Royat, no matter where, as long as he was not obliged to come home.
"She began to grow thin; every other thought, every other wish, every other expectation and every other confused hope, disappeared from her mind, and the hours during which she did not see him, became hours of terrible suffering to her. Soon he used frequently not to come home at night; he spent them with women at the casino at Royat, and did not come home until daybreak. But she never went to bed before he returned. She remained sitting motionless in an easy chair, with her eyes fixed on the clock, which turned so slowly and regularly round the china face, on which the hours were painted.
"She heard the trot of his horse in the distance, and sat up with a start, and when he came into the room, she got up with the movements of a phantom, and pointed to the clock, as if to say to him: 'Look how late it is!'
"And he began to be afraid of this amorous and jealous, half-witted woman, and flew into a rage, like brutes do; and one night, he even went so far as to strike her, so they sent for me. When I arrived she was writhing and screaming, in a terrible crisis of pain, anger, passion, how do I know what? Can one tell what goes on in such undeveloped brains?
"I calmed her by subcutaneous injections of morphine, and forbade her to see that man again, for I saw clearly that marriage would infallibly kill her, by degrees."
"Then she went mad! Yes, my dear friend, that idiot has gone mad. She is always thinking of him and waiting for him; she waits for him all day and night, awake or asleep, at this very moment, ceaselessly. When I saw her getting thinner and thinner, and as she persisted in never taking her eyes off the clocks, I had them removed from the house. I thus made it impossible for her to count the hours, and to try to remember, from her indistinct reminiscences, at what time he used to come home, formerly. I hope to destroy the recollection of it in time, and to extinguish that ray of thought which I kindled with so much difficulty.
"The other day, I tried an experiment. I offered her my watch; she took it and looked at it for some time; then she began to scream terribly, as if the sight of that little object had suddenly aroused her recollection, which was beginning to grow indistinct. She is pitiably thin now, with hollow cheeks and brilliant eyes, and she walks up and down ceaselessly, like a wild beast does in its cage; I have had bars put to the windows, and have had the seats fixed to the floor, so as to prevent her from looking to see whether he is coming.
"Oh! her poor parents! What a life they must lead!"
We had got to the top of the hill, and the doctor turned round and said to me:
"Look at Riom from here."
The gloomy town looked like some ancient city. Behind it, a green, wooded plain studded with towns and villages, and bathed in a soft blue haze, extended, until it was lost in the distance. Far away, on my right, there was a range of lofty mountains with round summits, or else cut off flat, as if with a sword, and the doctor began to enumerate the villages, towns and hills, and to give me the history of all of them. But I did not listen to him; I was thinking of nothing but the mad woman, and I only saw her. She seemed to be hovering over that vast extent of country like a mournful ghost, and I asked him abruptly:
"What has become of the husband?"
My friend seemed rather surprised, but after a few moments' hesitation, he replied:
"He is living at Royat, on an allowance that they make, and is quite happy; he leads a very fast life."
As we were slowly going back, both of us silent and rather low-spirited, an English dog cart, drawn by a thoroughbred horse, came up behind us, and passed us rapidly. The doctor took me by the arm.
"There he is," he said.
I saw nothing except a gray felt hat, cocked over one ear, above a pair of broad shoulders, driving off in a cloud of dust.
ABANDONED
"I really think you must be mad, my dear, to go for a country walk in such weather as this. You have had some very strange ideas for the last two months. You take me to the sea side in spite of myself, when you have never once had such a whim during all the forty-four years that we have been married. You chose Fécamp, which is a very dull town, without consulting me in the matter, and now you are seized with such a rage for walking, you who hardly ever stir out on foot, that you want to go into the country on the hottest day in the year. Ask d'Apreval to go with you, as he is ready to gratify all your fancies. As for me, I am going back to have a nap."
Madame de Cadour turned to her old friend and said:
"Will you come with me, Monsieur d'Apreval?"
He bowed with a smile, and with all the gallantry of by-gone years:
"I will go wherever you go," he replied.
"Very well, then, go and get a sunstroke," Monsieur de Cadour said; and he went back to the Hôtel des Bains, to lie down on his bed for an hour or two.
As soon as they were alone, the old lady and her old companion set off, and she said to him in a low voice, squeezing his hand:
"At last! at last!"
"You are mad," he said in a whisper. "I assure you that you are mad. Think of the risk you are running. If that man …"
She started.
"Oh! Henri, do not say that man, when you are speaking of him."
"Very well," he said abruptly, "if our son guesses anything, if he has any suspicions, he will have you, he will have us both in his power. You have got on without seeing him for the last forty years; what is the matter with you to-day?"
They had been going up the long street that leads from the sea to the town, and now they turned to the right, to go to Etretat. The white road extended in front of them, under a blaze of brilliant sunshine, so they went on slowly in the burning heat. She had taken her old friend's arm, and was looking straight in front of her, with a fixed and haunted gaze, and at last she said:
"And so you have not seen him again, either?"
"No, never."
"Is it possible?"
"My dear friend, do not let us begin that discussion again. I have a wife and children and you have a husband, so we both of us have much to fear from other people's opinion."
She did not reply; she was thinking of her long-past youth, and of many sad things that had occurred. She had been married as girls are married; she hardly knew her betrothed, who was a diplomatist, and later, she lived the same life with him that all women of the world live with their husbands. But Monsieur d'Apreval, who was also married, loved her with a profound passion, and while Monsieur de Cadour was absent in India, on a political mission for a long time, she succumbed. Could she possibly have resisted, have refused to give herself? Could she have had the strength and courage not to have yielded, as she loved him also? No, certainly not; it would have been too hard; she would have suffered too much! How cruel and deceitful life is! Is it possible to avoid certain attacks of fate, or can one escape from one's destiny? When a solitary, abandoned woman, without children and with a careless husband, always escapes from the passion which a man feels for her, as she would escape from the sun, in order to live in darkness until she dies?
How well she recalled all the details, his kisses, his smiles, the way he used to stop, in order to watch her until she was indoors. What happy days they were; the only really delicious days she had ever enjoyed; and how quickly they were over!
And then she discovered that she was pregnant! What anguish!
Oh! that journey to the South, that long journey, her sufferings, her constant terror, that secluded life in the small, solitary house on the shores of the Mediterranean, at the bottom of a garden, which she did not venture to leave. How well she remembered those long days which she spent lying under an orange tree, looking up at the round, red fruit, amidst the green leaves. How she used to long to go out, as far as the sea, whose fresh breezes came to her over the wall, and whose small waves she could hear lapping on the beach. She dreamt of its immense blue expanse sparkling under the sun, with the white sails of the small vessels, and a mountain on the horizon. But she did not dare to go outside the gate; suppose anybody had recognized her, unshapely as she was, and showing her disgrace by her expanded waist!
And those days of waiting, those last days of misery and expectation! The impending suffering and then, that terrible night! What misery she had endured, and what a night it was! How she had groaned and screamed! She could still see the pale face of her lover, who kissed her hand every moment, and the clean-shaven face of the doctor, and the nurse's white cap.
And what she felt when she heard the child's feeble cries, that mewling, that first effort of a human voice!
And the next day! the next day! the only day of her life on which she had seen and kissed her son, for from that time, she had never even caught a glimpse of him.
And what a long, void existence hers had been since then, with the thought of that child always, always floating before her. She had never seen her son, that little creature that had been part of herself, even once since then; they had taken him from her, carried him away and hidden him. All she knew was, that he had been brought up by some peasants in Normandy, that he had become a peasant himself, had married well, and that his father, whose name he did not know, had settled a handsome sum of money on him.
How often during the last forty years had she wished to go and see him, and to embrace him. She could not imagine to herself that he had grown! She always thought of that small, human larva, which she had held in her arms and pressed to her side for a day.
How often she had said to her lover: "I cannot bear it any longer; I must go and see him."
But he had always stopped her, and kept her from going. She would not be able to restrain and to master herself; their son would guess it and take advantage of her, blackmail her; she would be lost.
"What is he like?" she said.
"I do not know; I have not seen him again, either."
"Is it possible? To have a son, and not to know him; to be afraid of him and to repulse him as if he were a disgrace! It is horrible."
They went along the dusty road, overcome by the scorching sun, and continually ascending that interminable hill.
"One might take it for a punishment," she continued; "I have never had another child, and I could no longer resist the longing to see him, which has possessed me for forty years. You men cannot understand that. You must remember that I shall not live much longer, and suppose I had never seen him again! never have seen him!.. Is it possible? How could I wait so long? I have thought about him every day since, and what a terrible existence mine has been! I have never awakened, never, do you understand, without my first thoughts being of him, of my child. How is he? Oh! How guilty I feel towards him! Ought one to fear what the world may say, in a case like this? I ought to have left everything to go after him, to bring him up and to show love for him. I should certainly have been much happier, but I did not dare, I was a coward. How I have suffered! Oh! How those poor, abandoned children must hate their mothers!"
She stopped suddenly, for she was choked by her sobs. The whole valley was deserted and silent in the dazzling light, and the overwhelming heat, and only the grasshoppers uttered their shrill, continuous chirp among the sparse, yellow grass on both sides of the road.
"Sit down a little," he said.
She allowed herself to be led to the side of the ditch, and sank down with her face in her hands. Her white hair, which hung in curls on both sides of her face, had become all of a lump, and she wept, overcome by profound grief, while he stood facing her, uneasy and not knowing what to say, and he merely murmured: "Come, have courage."
She got up.
"I will," she said, and wiping her eyes, she began to walk again with the jerky steps of an old woman.
Rather farther on, the road passed under a clump of trees, which hid a few houses, and they could distinguish the vibrating and regular blows of a blacksmith's hammer on the anvil; and soon they saw a cart drawn upon the right in front of a low cottage, and two men shoeing a horse under a shed.
Monsieur d'Apreval went up to them.
"Where is Pierre Benedict's farm?" he asked.
"Take the road on the left, close to the public house, and then go straight on; it is the third house past Poret's. There is a small spruce-fir close to the gate; you cannot make a mistake."
They turned to the left; she was walking very slowly now; her legs threatened to give way, and her heart was beating so violently that she felt as if she should be suffocated, while at every step she murmured, as if in prayer:
"Oh! good heavens! good heavens!"
Monsieur d'Apreval, who was also nervous and rather pale, said to her somewhat gruffly:
"If you cannot manage to command your feelings better, you will betray yourself immediately. Do try and restrain yourself."
"How can I?" she replied. "My child! When I think that I am going to see my child!"
They were going along one of those narrow country lanes between farmyards, that are buried beneath a double row of beech trees, by the sides of the ditches, and suddenly they found themselves in front of a gate, over which there hung a young spruce-fir.
"This is it," he said.
She stopped suddenly and looked about her. The courtyard, which was planted with apple-trees, was large and extended as far as the small, thatched dwelling-house. Opposite to it, were the stable, the barn, the cow-house and the poultry-house, while the gig, wagon and the manure cart were under a slated outhouse. Four calves were grazing under the shade of the trees, and black hens were wandering all about the enclosure.
All was perfectly still; the house door was open, but nobody was to be seen, and so they went in, when immediately a large, black dog came out of a barrel that was standing under a pear tree, and began to bark furiously.
There were four bee-hives on boards against the wall of the house.
Monsieur d'Apreval stood outside and called out:
"Is anybody at home?"
Then a girl appeared, a little girl of about ten, dressed in a chemise and a linen petticoat, with dirty, bare legs, and a timid and cunning look. She remained standing in the doorway, as if to prevent any one going in.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"Is your father in?"
"No."
"Where is he?"
"I don't know."
"And your mother?"
"Gone after the cows."
"Will she be back soon?"
"I don't know."
But suddenly, the old woman, as if she feared that he might force her to return, said quickly:
"I will not go without having seen him."
"We will wait for him, my dear friend."
As they turned away, they saw a peasant woman coming towards the house, carrying two tin pails, which appeared to be heavy, and which glistened brightly in the sunlight.
