 CHAPTER III. The Duchess, Josiana. Toward 1705, although Lady Josiana was twenty-three and Lord David forty-four, the wedding had not yet taken place, and that for the best reasons in the world. Did they hate each other? Far from it, but what cannot escape from you inspires you with no haste to obtain it. Josiana wanted to remain free, David, to remain young, to have no time till as late as possible appeared to him to be a prolongation of youth. The aged young men abounded in those rakish times. They grew gray as young thops. The wig was an accomplice. Later on, powder became the auxiliary. At fifty-five, Lord Charles Gerard, Baron Gerard, one of the Gerards of Bromley, filled London with his successes. The young and pretty Duchess of Buckingham, Countess of Coventry, made a fool of herself for love of the handsome Thomas Valassus, Visconde Falconberg, who was sixty-seven. People quoted the famous verses of Cornel, the Septuagenarian, to a girl of twenty, Marquis Simon Visage. Women, too, had their successes in the autumn of life, Witness Ninon and Marion, such were the models of the day. Josiana and David carried on a flirtation of a particular shade. They did not love, they pleased each other. To be at each other's side sufficed them. Why hasten the conclusion? The novels of those days carried lovers and engaged couples to that kind of stage which was the most becoming. Besides Josiana, while she knew herself to be a bastard, felt herself a princess, and carried her authority over him with a high tone in all their arrangements. She had a fancy for Lord David. Lord David was handsome, but that was over and above the bargain. She considered him to be fashionable. To be fashionable is everything. Caliban, fashionable and magnificent, with distance aerial, poor. Lord David was handsome, so much the better. The danger in being handsome is being insipid, and that he was not. He bedded, boxed, ran into debt. Josiana thought great things of his horses, his dogs, his losses at play, his mistresses. Lord David, on his side, bowed down before the fascinations of the Duchess Josiana, a maiden without spot or scruple, haughty, inaccessible and audacious. He addressed sonnets to her, which Josiana sometimes read. In these sonnets he declared that to possess Josiana would be to rise to the stars, which did not prevent his always putting the ascent off to the following year. He waited in the ante-chamber outside Josiana's heart, and this suited the convenience of both. At court all admired the good taste of this delay. She Josiana said, It is a bore that I should be obliged to marry Lord David, I who would desire nothing better than to be in love with him. Josiana was the flesh. Nothing could be more resplendent. She was very tall, too tall. Her hair was of that tinge which might be called red gold. She was plump, fresh, strong and rosy, with immense boldness and wit. She had eyes which were too intelligible. She had neither lovers nor chastity. She walled herself round with pride. Men! Oh, fie! A god only would be worthy of her, or a monster. If virtue consists in the protection of an inaccessible position, Josiana possessed all possible virtue, but without any innocence. She disdained intrigues, but she would not have been displeased had she been supposed to have engaged in some, provided that the objects were uncommon and proportioned to the merits of one so highly placed. She thought little of her reputation, but much of her glory. To appear yielding, and to be unapproachable, is perfection. Josiana felt herself majestic and material. Hers was a cumbrous beauty. She asserted rather than charmed. She trod upon hearts. She was earthly. She would have been as much astonished at being proved to have a soul in her bosom as wings on her back. She discoursed on Locke. She was polite. She was suspected of knowing Arabic. To be the flesh, and to be woman, are two different things. Where a woman is vulnerable, on the side of pity, for instance, which so readily turns to love, Josiana was not. Not that she was unfeeling. The ancient comparison of flesh to marble is absolutely false. The beauty of flesh consists in not being marble. Its beauty is to palpitate, to tremble, to blush, to bleed, to have firmness without hardness, to be white without being cold, to have its sensations and its infirmities. Its beauty is to be life, and marble is death. Flesh, when it attains a certain degree of beauty, has almost acclaimed to the right of nudity. It conceals itself in its own dazzling charms as in a veil. He who might have looked upon Josiana nude would have perceived her outlines only through a surrounding glory. She would have shown herself without hesitation to a satyr or a eunuch. She had the self-possession of a goddess. To have made her nudity a torment, ever eluding a pursuing tantalus, would have been an amusement to her. The king had made her a duchess, and Jupiter a neeride, a double irradiation of which the strange brightness of this creature was composed. In admiring her you felt yourself becoming a pagan and a lackey. Her origin had been bastardy, and the ocean. She appeared to have emerged from the foam. From the stream had risen the first jet of her destiny, but the spring was royal. In her there was something of the wave, of chance, of the patrician, and of the tempest. She was well read and accomplished, never had a passion approached her, yet she had sounded them all. She had a disgust for realizations, and at the same time a taste for them. If she had stabbed herself it would, like Lucretia, not have been until afterwards. She was a virgin stained with every defilement in its visionary stage. She was a possible estarta in a real Diana. She was in the insolence of high birth, tempting and inaccessible. Nevertheless, she might find it amusing to plan a fall for herself. She dwelt in a halo of glory, half wishing to descend from it, and, perhaps, feeling curious to know what a fall was like. She was a little too heavy for her cloud. Too air is a diversion. Prinsely unconstrained has the privilege of experiment, and what is frailty and a plebian is only frolic in a duchess. Diana was in everything, in birth, in beauty, in irony, in brilliance, almost a queen. She had felt a moment's enthusiasm for Louis de Beaufort's, who used to break horseshoes between his fingers. She regretted that Hercules was dead. She lived in some undefined expectation of a voluptuous and supreme ideal. Morley, Josiana brought to one's mind the line, On botos de fem, on hidros et amine. Hers was a noble neck, a splendid bosom. Heaving harmoniously over a royal heart, a glance full of life and light, a countenance pure and haughty. And who knows, below the surface was there not in a semi-transparent and misty depth an undulating supernatural prolongation, perchance deformed and dragon-like, a proud virtue ending in vice in the depth of dreams. Two. With all that she was a prude. It was the fashion. Remember Elizabeth? Elizabeth was of a type that prevailed in England for three centuries, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth. Elizabeth was more than English. She was Anglican. Hence the deep respect of the Episcopalian Church for that queen, respect resented by the Church of Rome, which counterbalanced it with a dash of excommunication. In the month of Sixtus V, when anathematizing Elizabeth, maladdiction turned to madrigal. Un grand cervello di principessa, he says. Mary Stewart, less concerned with the Church and more with the woman part of the question, had little respect for her sister Elizabeth, and wrote to her as queen to queen and caquette to prude. Your disinclination to marriage arises from your not wishing to lose the liberty of being made love to. Mary Stewart played with the fan, Elizabeth with the ax. An uneven match. They were rivals, besides, in literature. Mary Stewart composed French verses. Elizabeth translated Horace, the ugly Elizabeth to create herself beautiful, liked quatrains and acrostics, had the keys of towns presented to her by cupids, bit her lips after the Italian fashion, rolled her eyes after the Spanish, had in her wardrobe three thousand dresses and costumes, of which several were for the character of Minerva and Amphitridi. Esteemed the Irish for the width of their shoulders, covered her farthinga with braids and spangles, loved roses, cursed, swore, and stamped, struck her maids of honour with her clenched fists, used to send Dudley to the devil, beat Burleigh, the chancellor who would cry, poor old fool, spat on Matthew, collared Hatton, boxed the ears of Essex, showed her legs to Basse-Pierre, and was a virgin. What she did for Basse-Pierre, the queen of Sheba, had done for Solomon. Consequently she was right, holy writ having created the president. That which is biblical may well be Anglican. Biblical precedent goes so far as to speak of a child who was called Ebnahakwam or Mileshet, that is to say the wise man's son. Why object to such matters? Sinicism is at least as good as hypocrisy. Nowadays, England, whose Loyola is named Wesley, casts down her eyes a little at the remembrance of that past age. She is vexed at the memory, yet proud of it. These fine ladies, moreover, knew Latin. From the sixteenth century this had been accounted of feminine accomplishment. Lady Jane Gray had carried fashion to the point of knowing Hebrew. The Duchess Josiana Latinized. Then another fine thing. She was secretly a Catholic. After the manner of her uncle, Charles II, rather than her father, James II, James II had lost his crown for his Catholicism, and Josiana did not care to risk her peerage. Thus it was that while a Catholic amongst her intimate friends in the refined of both sexes, she was outwardly a Protestant, for the benefit of the riff-raff. This is the pleasant view to take of religion. You enjoy all the good things belonging to the official Episcopalian church, and later on you die, like Grotius, in the odor of Catholicity, having the glory of a mass being said for you by La Perpeto. Although plump and healthy, Josiana was, we repeat, a perfect prude. At times her sleepy and voluptuous way of dragging out the ends of her phrases was like the creeping of a tiger's paws in the jungle. The advantage of prudes is that they disorganize the human race. They deprive it of the honor of their adherents. Beyond all, keep the human species at a distance. This is a point of the greatest importance. When one is not God Olympus, one must take the hotel de Rambouillet. Juno resolves herself into Araminta. A pretension to divinity not admitted creates affectation. In default of thunderclaps there is impertinence. The temple shrivels into the boudoir. Not having the power to be a goddess, she is an idol. There is besides in prudery a certain pedantry which is pleasing to women. The car-cat and the pedant are neighbors. Their kinship is visible in the fob. The subtle is derived from the sensual. Gluttony affects delicacy. A grimace of disgust conceals cupidity. And then woman feels her weak point guarded by all that casuous tree of gallantry which takes the place of scruples in prudes. It is a line of circumvallation with a ditch. Every prude puts on an air of repugnance. It is a protection. She will consent, but she disdains for the present. Josiana had an uneasy conscience. She felt such a leaning towards immodesty that she was a prude. The recoils of pride in the direction opposed to our vices lead us to those of a contrary nature. It was the excessive effort to be chased, which made her a prude. To be too much on the defensive points to a secret desire for attack. The shy woman is not straight laced. She shut herself up in the arrogance of the exceptional circumstances of her rank, meditating perhaps all the while, some sudden lapse from it. It was the dawn of the eighteenth century. England was a sketch of what France was during the Regency. Walpole and Du Bois are not unlike. Marlboro was fighting against his former king, James II, to whom it was said he had sold his sister, Miss Churchill. Ballingbrook was in his meridian, and Richelieu in his dawn. Gallantry found its convenience in a certain medley of ranks. Men were equalized by the same vices as they were later on, perhaps by the same ideas. Degradation of rank and aristocratic prelude began what the revolution was to complete. It was not very far off the time when Geliott was seen publicly sitting in broad daylight on the bed of the Marquis de Pinais. It is true, for matters re-echo each other, that in the sixteenth century Smenton's nightcap had been found under Anne Boleyn's pillow. If the word woman signifies fault, as I forget what counsel decided, never was woman so womanlike as then. Never, covering her frailty by her charms and her weakness by her omnipotence, she claimed absolution more imperiously. In making the forbidden the permitted fruit, Eve fell. In making the permitted the forbidden fruit, she triumphs. That is the climax. In the eighteenth century the wife bolts out her husband. She shuts herself up and eaten with Satan. Adam's left outside. Three. All Josiana's instincts impelled her to yield herself gallantly, rather than to give herself legally. To surrender on the score of gallantry implies learning, recalls Melancas and Amaryllis, and is almost a literary act. Madame Ozel de Scuderay, putting aside the attraction of ugliness for ugliness's sake, had no other motive for yielding to Pelissan. The maiden, a sovereign, the wife, a subject. Such was the old English notion. Josiana was deferring the hour of this subjugation as long as she could. She must eventually marry Lord David, since such was the royal pleasure. He was a necessity, doubtless, but what a pity. Josiana appreciated Lord David, and showed him off. There was between them a tacit agreement neither to conclude nor to break off the engagement. They alluded each other. This method of making love one step in advance and two back is expressed in the dances of the period, the minuet and the gavotte. It is unbecoming to be married, fades one's ribbons and makes one look old, and the spousal is a dreary absorption of brilliancy. A woman handed over to you by a notary, how commonplace! The brutality of marriage creates definite situations, suppresses the will, kills choice, has a syntax, like grammar, replaces inspiration by orthography, makes a dictation of love, disperses all life's mysteries, diminishes the rights both of sovereign and subject, by a turn of the scale destroys the charming equilibrium of the sexes, the one robust in bodily strength, the other all powerful in feminine weakness, strength on one side, beauty on the other, makes one a master and the other a servant, while without marriage one is a slave, the other a queen. To make love prosaically decent, how gross! To deprive it of all its impropriety, how dull! Lord David was ripening, forty, it is a marked period. He did not perceive this, and in truth he looked no more than thirty. He considered it more amusing to desire Josiana than to possess her. He possessed others, he had mistresses. On the other hand Josiana had dreams. The duchess Josiana had a peculiarity, less rare than it is supposed. One of her eyes was blue, and the other black. Her pupils were made for love and hate, for happiness and misery. Night and day were mingled in her look. Her ambition was this, to show herself capable of impossibilities. One day she said to Swift, You people fancy that you know what scorn is. You people meant the human race. She was a skin-deep papist. Her Catholicism did not exceed the amount necessary for fashion. She would have been a puseite in the present day. She wore great dresses of velvet, satin, or moire, some composed of fifteen or sixteen yards of material, with embroideries of gold and silver, and round her waist many knots of pearls, alternating with other precious stones. She was extravagant in gold lace. Sometimes she wore an embroidered cloth jacket like a bachelor. She rode on a man's saddle, notwithstanding the invention of side-saddles, introduced into England in the fourteenth century by Anne, wife of Richard II. She washed her face, arms, shoulders, and neck in sugar candy, diluted in white of egg, after the fashion of Castile. There came over her face, after anyone had spoken wittily in her presence, a reflective smile of singular grace. She was free from malice and rather good-natured than otherwise. The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo Part 2 Book I. Chapter 4 The Leader of Fashion Josiana was bored. The fact is so natural as to be scarcely worth mentioning. Lord David held the position of judge in the gay life of London. He was looked up to by the nobility and gentry. Let us register a glory of Lord David's. He was daring enough to wear his own hair. The reaction against the wig was beginning. Just as in 1824 Eugene de Varia was the first to allow his beard to grow, so in 1702 Prince Devereux was the first to risk wearing his own hair in public, disguised by artful curling. For to risk one's hair was almost to risk one's head. The indignation was universal. Nevertheless, Prince Devereux was Vicente Haerford, and a peer of England. He was insulted, and the deed was well worth the insult. In the hottest part of the row, Lord David suddenly appeared without his wig into his own hair. Such conduct shakes the foundations of society. Lord David was insulted even more than Vicente Haerford. He held his ground. Prince Devereux was the first, Lord David de Rimoire, the second. It is sometimes more difficult to be second than first. It requires less genius, but more courage. The first, intoxicated by the novelty, may ignore the danger. The second sees the abyss, and rushes into it. Lord David flung himself into the abyss of no longer wearing a wig. Later on these lords found imitators. Following these two revolutionists, men found sufficient audacity to wear their own hair, and powder was introduced as an extenuating circumstance. In order to establish, before we pass on, an important period of history, we should remark that the first blow in the War of Wigs was really struck by a queen, Christina of Sweden, who wore man's clothes, and had appeared in sixteen eighty in her hair of golden brown, powdered, and brushed up from her head. She had, besides, says Mission, a slight beard. The pope, on his part, by a bull of March sixteen ninety-four, had somewhat let down the wig, by taking it from the heads of bishops and priests, and in ordering churchmen to let their hair grow. Lord David, then, did not wear a wig, and did wear cow-hide boots. Which great things made him a mark for public admiration. There was not a club of which he was not the leader, not a boxing-match in which he was not desired as a referee. The referee is the arbitrator. He had drawn up the rules of several clubs in high life. He founded several resorts of fashionable society, of which one, the Lady Guinea, was still in existence in Paul Mall in seventeen seventy-two. The Lady Guinea was a club in which all the youth of the peerage congregated. They gamed there. The lowest stake allowed was a rollo of fifty guineas, and there was never less than twenty thousand guineas on the table. By the side of each player was a little stand on which to place his cup of tea, and a gilt bowl in which to put the rollo of guineas. The players, like servants when cleaning knives, wore leather sleeves to save their lace, brushed plates of leather to protect their ruffles, shades on their brows to shelter their eyes from the great glare of the lamps, and, to keep their curls in order, broad brimmed hats covered with flowers. They were masked to conceal their excitement, especially when playing the game of Queens. All moreover had their coats turned the wrong way for luck. Lord David was a member of the Beefstake Club, the Surly Club, and of the Split Farthing Club, of the Cross Club, the Scratchpenny Club, of the Sealed Knot, a Royalist Club, and of the Martinus Scribilaris, founded by Swift, to take the place of the Rota, founded by Milton. Though handsome, he belonged to the Ugly Club. This club was dedicated to deformity. The members agreed to fight, not about a beautiful woman, but about an ugly man. The Hall of the Club was adorned by hideous portraits, Theristates, Trebele, Duns, Houda Bra, Scaran. Over the chimney was Esop, between two men, each blind of an eye, cockles and camoans. Cockles being blind of the left, camoans of the right eye, so arranged that the two profiles without eyes were turned to each other. The day that the beautiful Mrs. Vizard caught the smallpox the Ugly Club toasted her. This club was still in existence in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Mirabeau was elected an honorary member. Since the restoration of Charles II, revolutionary clubs had been abolished. The tavern in the Little Street by Moorfields, where the calf's head club was held, had been pulled down. It was so called, because on the thirtieth of January, the day on which the blood of Charles I flowed on the scaffold, the members had drunk red wine out of the skull of a calf to the health of Cromwell. To the republican clubs had seceded monarchial clubs. In them people amused themselves with decency. There was the Hellfire Club, where they played at being impious. It was a joust of sacrilege. Hell was an auction there to the highest bidder and blasphemy. There was the Budding Club, so called from its members' budding folks with their heads. They found some street porter with a wide chest in his stupid countenance. They offered him, and compelled him, if necessary, to accept a pot of porter, in return for which he was to allow them to butt him with their heads four times in the chest, and on this they bedded. One day a man, a great brood of a Welshman named Gogengird, expired at the third butt. This looked serious. An inquest was held, and the jury returned the following verdict. Died of an inflammation of the heart, caused by excessive drinking. Gogengird had certainly drunk the contents of the pot of porter. There was the Fun Club. Fun is like can't. Like humor. Word which is untranslatable. Fun is to farce what pepper is to salt. To get into a house and break a valuable mirror, slash the family portraits, poison the dog, put the cat in the aviary is called a bit of fun. To give bad news which is untrue, whereby people put on mourning by mistake, is fun. It was fun to cut a square hole in the hallbine at Hampton Court. Fun would have been proud to have broken the arm of the Venus of Milo. Under James II a young millionaire lord who had during the night set fire to a thatched cottage, a feat which made all London burst with laughter, was proclaimed the king of fun. The poor devils in the cottage were saved in their nightclothes. The members of the Fun Club, all of the highest aristocracy, used to run about London during the hours when the citizens were asleep, pulling the hinges from the shutters, cutting off the pipes of pumps, filling up cisterns, digging up cultivated plots of ground, putting out lamps, sawing through the beams which supported houses, breaking the window panes, especially in the poor quarters of the town. It was the rich who acted thus toward the poor. For this reason no complaint was possible. That was the best part of the joke. Those manners have not altogether disappeared. In many places in England, and in England possessions, at Guernsey, for instance, your house is now and then somewhat damaged during the night, or a fence is broken, or the knocker twisted off your door. If it were poor people who did these things they would be sent to jail. But they are done by pleasant young gentlemen. The most fashionable of the clubs was presided over by an emperor, who wore a crescent on his forehead, and was called the Grand Mohawk. The Mohawk surpassed the Fun. Do evil for evil's sake was the program. The Mohawk Club had one great object—to injure. To fulfill this duty all means were held good. In becoming a Mohawk the members took an oath to be hurtful. To injure at any price, no matter what, no matter whom, no matter where, was a matter of duty. Every member of the Mohawk Club was bound to possess an accomplishment. One was a dancing master. That is to say, he made the rustics frisk about by pricking the calves of their legs with the point of his sword. Others knew how to make a man sweat. That is to say, a circle of gentlemen with drawn wrappers went surround a poor wretch, so that it was impossible for him not to turn his back upon someone. The gentlemen behind him chastised him for this by a prick of his sword, which made him spring round. Another prick in the back warned the fellow that one of noble blood was behind him, and so on, each one wounding him in his turn. When the man, closed round by the circle of swords and covered with blood, had turned and danced about enough, they ordered their servants to beat him with sticks, to change the course of his ideas. Others hit the loin. That is, they gaily stopped a passenger, broke his nose with a blow of the fist, and then shoved both thumbs into his eyes. If his eyes were gouged out, he was paid for them. Such were, towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, the pastimes of the rich idlers of London. The idlers of Paris had theirs. Monsieur de Charles was firing his gun at a citizen standing on his own threshold. In all times youth has had its amusements. Lord David de Rimoire brought into all these institutions his magnificent and liberal spirit. Just like any one else, he would gaily set fire to a cot of woodwork and thatch, and just scorch those within. But he would rebuild their houses in stone. He insulted two ladies. One was unmarried, he gave her a portion. The other was married. He had her husband depointed chaplain. Cock-fighting owed him some praise-worthy improvements. It was marvellous to see Lord David dress a cock for the pit. Cock's lay hold of each other by the feathers, as meant by the hair. Lord David, therefore, made his cock as bald as possible. With a pair of scissors he cut off all the feathers from the tail and from the head to the shoulders, and all those on the neck. So much less for the enemy's beak, he used to say. Then he extended the cock's wings and cut each feather one after another to a point. Unless the wings were furnished with darts, so much for the enemy's eyes, he would say. Then he scraped its claws with a pen-knife, sharpened its nails, fitted it with spurs of sharp steel, spat on its head, spat on its neck, anointed it with spittle, as they used to rub oil over athletes, then set it down in the pit. A redoubtable champion, exclaiming, that's ought to make a cock an eagle, and a bird of the poultry, and a bird of the mountain. Lord David attended prize-fights and was their living law. On occasions of great performances it was he who had the stakes driven in and ropes stretched, and who fixed the number of feet for the ring. When he was a second he followed his man step by step. A bottle in one hand, a sponge in the other, crying out to him to hit hard, suggesting stratagems, advising him as he fought, wiping away the blood, raising him when overthrown, placing him on his knee, putting the mouth of the bottle between his teeth, and from his own mouth filled with water, blowing a fine rain into his eyes and ears. A thing which reanimates even a dying man. If he was referee he saw that there was no foul play, prevented any one, whosoever he might be, from assisting the combatants, accepting the seconds, declared the man beaten who did not fairly face his opponent, watched that the time between the rounds did not exceed half a minute, prevented budding, and declared whosoever resorted to it beaten, and forbade a man's being hit with down. All this science, however, did not render him a pedant, nor destroy his ease of manner in society. When he was referee, rough, pimple-faced, unshorn friends of either combatant, never dared to come to the aid of their failing man, nor, in order to upset the chances of the betting, jumped over the barrier, entered the ring, broke the ropes, pulled down the stakes, and violently interposed in the battle. Lord David was one of the few referees whom they dared not thrash. No one could train like him. The pugilist whose trainer he consented to become was sure to win. Lord David would choose a Hercules, massive as a rock, tall as a tower, and make him his child. The problem was to turn that human rock from a defensive to an offensive state. In this he excelled. Having once adopted the Cyclops, he never left him. He became his nurse. He measured out his wine, weighed his meat, and counted his hours of sleep. It was he who invented the athlete's admirable rules, afterwards pronounced by Morley. In the mornings a raw egg and a glass of sherry, at twelve some slices of a leg of mutton, almost raw, with tea, at four a toast and tea, in the evening pale ale and toast, after which he undressed his man, rubbed him, and put him to bed. In the street he never allowed him to leave his sight, keeping him out of every danger, run away horses, the wheels of carriages, drunken soldiers, pretty girls. He watched over his virtue. This maternal solicitude continually brought some new perfection into the pupil's education. He taught him the blow with the fist which breaks the teeth, and the twist of the thumb which gouges out the eye, what could be more touching? Because he was preparing himself for public life, to which he was to be called later on, it was no easy manner to become an accomplished gentleman. Lord David Deerey Moore was passionately fond of open-air exhibitions, of shows, of circuses with wild beasts, of the caravans of mountain-backs, of clowns, tumblers, merry-men, open-air farses, and the wonders of a fair. The true noble is he who smacks of the people. Therefore it was that Lord David frequented the taverns and the low haunts of London and the sink-ports, in order to be able at need, and without compromising his rank in the white squadron, to be cheek by jowl with a topman or a colker. He used to wear a sailor's jacket when he went out into the slums. For such disguise, his not wearing a wig was convenient. For even under Louis XIV the people kept to their hair like the lion to his mane. This gave him great freedom of action. The low people whom Lord David used to meet in the stews, and with whom he mixed, held him in high esteem, without ever dreaming that he was a lord. They called him Tom Jim Jack. Under this name he was famous and very popular amongst the dregs of the people. He played the black guard in a masterly style. When necessary he used his fists. This phase of his fashionable life was highly appreciated by Lady Josiana. CHAPTER V. 1. Above this couple there was Anne, Queen of England. An ordinary woman was Queen Anne. She was gay, kindly, august, to a certain extent. No quality of her is attained to virtue, none to vice. Her stoutness was bloated, her fun heavy, her good nature stupid. She was stubborn and weak. As a wife she was faithless and faithful, having favourites to whom she gave up her heart, and a husband for whom she kept her bed. As a Christian she was a heretic and a bigot. She had one beauty, the well-developed neck of a Niobie. The rest of her person was indifferently formed. She was a clumsy caquette and a chaste one. Her skin was white and fine. She displayed a great deal of it. It was she who introduced the fashion of necklaces of large pearls clasped round the throat. She had a narrow forehead, sensual lips, fleshy cheeks, large eyes, short sight. Her short sight extended to her mind. Beyond a burst of merriment now and then, almost as ponderous as her anger, she lived in a sort of taciturn grumble and a grumbling silence. Words escaped from her which had to be guessed at. She was a mixture of a good woman and a mischievous devil. She liked surprises, which is extremely womanlike. One was a pattern, just sketched roughly, of the universal eve. To that sketch had fallen that chance, the throne. She drank. Her husband was a dain, thoroughbred. A Tory she governed by the wigs, like a woman, like a mad woman. She had fits of rage. She was violent, a brawler. Nobody more awkward than Anne in directing affairs of state. She allowed events to fall about as they might chance. Her whole policy was cracked. She excelled in bringing about great catastrophes from little causes. When a whim of authority took hold of her, she called it giving a stir with the poker. She would say with an air of profound thought, no pier may keep his hat on before the king except a corsie, Baron Kingsale, an Irish pier. Or it would be an injustice for my husband not to be Lord High Admiral, since my father was. And she made George of Denmark High Admiral of England and of all her majesty's plantations. She was perpetually perspiring bad humor. She did not explain her thought. She exuded it. There was something of the Sphinx in this goose. She rather liked fun, teasing, and practical jokes. Could she have made Apollo a hunchback it would have delighted her. But she would have left him a god. Good natured her ideal was to allow none to despair and to worry all. She had often a rough word in her mouth, a little more and she would have sworn like Elizabeth. From time to time she would take from a man's pocket, which she wore in her skirt, a little round box of chased silver, on which was her portrait in profile, between the two letters QA. She would open this box and take from it, on her finger, a little pomade, with which she reddened her lips, and having colored her mouth would laugh. She was greedily fond of the flat, zeal and gingerbread cakes. She was proud of being fat. More of a puritan than anything else she would, nevertheless, have liked to devote herself to stage plays. She had an absurd academy of music, copied after that of France. In 1700 a Frenchman named Fort Roche wanted to build a royal circus at Paris, at a cost of four hundred thousand francs, which Scheme was opposed by Djargensen. This Fort Roche passed into England and proposed to Queen Anne, who was immediately charmed by the idea, to build in London a theatre with machinery, with a fourth understage finer than that of the King of France. Like Louis XIV she liked to be driven at a gallop. Her teams and relays would sometimes do the distance between London and Windsor in less than an hour and a quarter. 2. In Anne's time no meeting was allowed without the permission of two Justices of the Peace. The assembly of twelve persons, where it only to eat oysters and drink porter, was a felony. Under her reign, otherwise relatively mild, pressing for the fleet was carried on with extreme violence, a gloomy evidence that the Englishman is a subject rather than a citizen. For centuries England suffered under that process of tyranny which gave the lie to all the old charters of freedom, and out of which France especially gathered a cause of triumph and indignation. What in some degrees diminishes the triumph is that while sailors were pressed in England, soldiers were pressed in France. In every great town of France any able-bodied man, going through the streets on his business, was liable to be shoved by the crimps into a house called the oven. There he was shut up with the others in the same plight. Those fit for service were picked out, and the recruiters sold them to the officers. In 1695 there were thirty of these ovens in Paris. The laws against Ireland, emanating from Queen Anne, were atrocious. Anne was born in 1664, two years before the Great Fire of London, on which the astrologers —there were some left, and Louis XIV was born with the assistance of an astrologer and swaddled in a horoscope—predicted that, being the elder sister of fire, she would be queen. And so she was, thanks to astrology and the revolution of 1688. She had the humiliation of having only Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, for godfather. To be godchild of the Pope was no longer possible in England. A mere primate is but a poor sort of godfather. Anne had to put up with one, however, it was her own fault. Why was she a Protestant? Denmark had paid for her virginity, virginitas empta, as the old charters expressed it, by a dowry of 6,250 pounds a year, secured on the Ballowic of Wardenburg and the island of Femarn. Anne followed, without conviction, and by routine, the traditions of William. The English under that royalty born of a revolution possessed as much liberty as they could lay hands on between the Tower of London, into which they put Orders and the Pillary, into which they put Writers. Anne spoke a little Danish in her private chats with her husband, and a little French in her private chats with Bollingbroke. Wretched gibberish, but the height of English fashion, especially at court, was to talk French. There was never a bon mot, but in French. Anne paid a deal of attention to her coins, especially to copper coins, which are the low and popular ones. She wanted to cut a great figure on them. Six farthings were struck during her reign. On the back of the first three she had merely a throne struck. On the back of the fourth she ordered a triumphal chariot, and on the back of the sixth a goddess holding a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other, with the scroll Bello et Pace. Her father, James II, was candid and cruel. She was brutal. At the same time she was mild at bottom, a contradiction which only appeared such. A fit of anger metamorphised her. Heat sugar, and it will boil. Anne was popular. England liked feminine rulers. Why? France excludes them. There is a reason at once. There is no other. With English historians Elizabeth embodies grandeur, Anne, good nature, as they will, be it so. But there is nothing delicate in the reigns of these women. The lines are heavy. It is gross grandeur and gross good nature. As to their immaculate virtue, England is tenacious of it, and we are not going to oppose the idea. Elizabeth was a virgin tempered by Essex, Anne, a wife, complicated by Bollingbroke. Three One idiotic habit of the people is to attribute to the king what they do themselves. They fight. Who is the glory? The kings. They pay. Who is the generosity? The kings. Then the people love him for being so rich. The king receives a crown from the poor and returns them a farthing. How generous he is. The colossus, which is the pedestal, contemplates the pygmy, which is the statue. How great is this mermaid, and he is on my back. A dwarf has an excellent way of being taller than a giant. It is to perch himself on his shoulders. But that the giant should allow it. There is the wonder, and that he should admire the height of the dwarf. There is the folly. Simplicity of mankind. The equestrian statue, reserved for kings alone, is an excellent figure of royalty. The horse is the people. Only that the horse becomes transfigured by degrees. It begins in an ass. It ends in a lion. Then it throws its rider, and you have 1642 in England and 1789 in France. And sometimes it devours him. And you have in England 1649 and in France 1793. That the lion should relapse into the donkey is astonishing, but it is so. This was occurring in England. It had resumed the pack saddle, idolatry of the crown. Queen Anne, as we have just observed, was popular. What was she doing, to be so? Nothing. Nothing! That is all that is asked of the sovereign of England. He receives for that nothing one million two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year. In 1705 England, which had but thirteen men of war under Elizabeth, and thirty-six under James I, counted a hundred and fifty in her fleet. The English had three armies, five thousand men in Catalonia, ten thousand in Portugal, fifty thousand in Flanders, and besides it was paying one million six hundred and sixty-six thousand six hundred and sixty-six pounds a year to monarchial and diplomatic Europe, a sort of prostitute the English people had always had in keeping. England having voted a patriotic loan of thirty-four million francs of annuities, there had been a crush at the Exchequer to subscribe it. England was sending a squadron to the East Indies and a squadron to the west of Spain under Admiral Leake, without mentioning the reserve of four hundred sale, under Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovel. England had lately annexed Scotland. It was the interval between Hoxtat and Rommelies, and the first of these victories was foretelling the second. England, in its cast of the net at Hoxtat, had made prisoners of twenty-seven battalions and four regiments of dragoons, and deprived France of one hundred leagues of country, France drawing back to Smaid from the Danube to the Rhine. England was stretching her hand out toward Sardinia and the Balearic Islands. She was bringing into her ports in triumph ten Spanish line of battleships, and many a galleon laden with gold. Hudson Bay and Straits were already half given over by Louis XIV. He was felt that he was about to give up his hold over Acadia, St. Christopher, and Newfoundland, and that he would be but too happy if England would only tolerate the King of France fishing for cod at Cape Breton. England was about to impose upon him the shame of demolishing himself the fortifications of Dunkirk. Meanwhile, she had taken Gibraltar and was taking Barcelona. What great things accomplished! How was it possible to refuse Anne's admiration for taking the trouble of living at the period? From a certain point of view the reign of Anne appears a reflection of the reign of Louis XIV. Anne, for a moment, even with that king in the race which is called history, bears to him the vague resemblance of a reflection. Like him, she plays at a great reign. She has her monuments, her arts, her victories, her captains, her men of letters, her privy purse to penchant celebrities, her gallery of chef d'oeuvre, side by side with those of his majesty. Her court, too, was a cortège with the features of a triumph, an order, and a march. It was a miniature copy of all the great men of Versailles, not giants themselves. In it there is enough to deceive the eye, add God save the queen, which might have been taken from Luley, and the ensemble becomes an illusion. Not a personage is missing. Christopher Wren is a very passable mansard. Summer is as good as Le Moignan. Anne has a racine in Dryden, and a bayou in Pope. A cobert in Godelfin, a louvoir in Pembroke, and a terrain in Malboro. In the wigs and lower the foreheads, the hole is solemn and pompous, and the Windsor of the Time has a faded resemblance to Marley. Still, the hole was effeminate, and Anne's pair tellière was called Sarah Jennings. However, there is an outline of incipient irony, which, fifty years later, was deterred to philosophy, and the literature of the age and the Protestant Tartuff is unmasked by swift, just in the same way as the Catholic Tartuff is denounced by Malieri. Although the England of the period quarrels and fights France, she imitates her and draws enlightenment from her, and the light on the facade of England is French light. It is a pity that Anne's reign lasted but twelve years, or the English would not hesitate to call it the century of Anne, as we say the century of Louis XIV. Anne appeared in 1702, as Louis XIV declined. It is one of the curiosities of history that the rise of that pale planet coincides with the setting of the planet of purple, and that at the moment in which France had the king's son, England, should have had the queen moon. A detail to be noted, Louis XIV, although they never made war with him, was greatly admired in England. He is the kind of king they want in France, said the English. The love of the English for their own liberty is mingled with a certain acceptance of servitude for others. That favourable regard of the chains which bind their neighbours sometimes attains to enthusiasm for the despot next door. To sum up, Anne rendered her people churru, as the French translator of B. Vrel's book repeats three times with graceful reiteration at the sixth and ninth page of his dedication and the third of his preface. 4. Queen Anne bore a little grudge to the Duchess Josiana for two reasons. Firstly, because she thought the Duchess Josiana handsome. Secondly, because she thought the Duchess Josiana's betrothed handsome. Two reasons for jealousy are sufficient for a woman. One is sufficient for a queen. Let us add that she bore her a grudge for being her sister. And did not like women to be pretty. She considered it against good morals. As for herself, she was ugly. Not from choice, however. A part of her religion she derived from that ugliness. Josiana, beautiful and philosophical, was a cause of vexation to the queen. To an ugly queen a pretty Duchess is not an agreeable sister. There was another grievance, Josiana's improper birth. Anne was the daughter of Anne Hyde, a simple gentlewoman legitimately, but vexatiously married by James II when Duke of York. Anne, having this inferior blood in her veins, felt herself but half-royal, and Josiana, having come into the world quite irregularly, drew closer attention to the incorrectness. Less great, but really existing, in the birth of the Queen. The daughter of Miss Alliance looked without love upon the daughter of Bastardy, so near her. It was an unpleasant resemblance. Josiana had a right to say to Anne, my mother was at least as good as yours. That court no one said so, but they evidently thought it. This was a bore for her royal majesty. Why this Josiana? What had put it into her head to be born? What good was a Josiana? Certain relationships are detrimental. Nevertheless, Anne smiled on Josiana. Perhaps she might even have liked her, had she not been her sister. End of section 39 Section 40 of The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dave Kaye of Southern Minnesota. The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo. Part 40 Book II Chapter 6 Barquil Fadro It is useful to know what people do. And a certain surveillance is wise. Josiana had Lord David watched by a little creature of hers in whom she reposed confidence, and whose name was Barquil Fadro. Lord David had Josiana discreetly observed by a creature of his, of whom he was sure, and whose name was Barquil Fadro. The Man, on her part, kept herself secretly informed of the actions and conduct of the duchess Josiana, her bastard sister. End of Lord David, her future brother-in-law by the left hand, by a creature of hers on whom she counted fully, and whose name was Barquil Fadro. This Barquil Fadro had his fingers on that keyboard. Josiana, Lord David, a queen. A man between two women. What modulations possible! What amalgamation of souls! Barquil Fadro had not always held a magnificent person of whispering into three ears. He was an old servant of the Duke of York. He had tried to be a churchman, but had failed. The Duke of York, an English and a Roman prince, compounded of royal papery and legal Anglicanism, had his Catholic house and his Protestant house, and might have pushed Barquil Fadro in one or the other hierarchy, but he did not judge him to be Catholic enough to make him almaner, nor Protestant enough to make him chaplain, so that between two religions Barquil Fadro found himself with his soul on the ground. Not a bad posture, either, for certain reptile souls. Certain ways are impracticable, except by crawling flat on the belly. An obscure but fattening servitude had long made up Barquil Fadro's whole existence. Service is something, but he wanted power besides. He was, perhaps, about to reach it when James II fell. He had to begin all over again. Nothing to do under William III, a sullen prince, and exercising in his mood of reigning a prudery which he believed to be probity. Barquil Fadro, when his protector James II was dethroned, did not lapse all at once into rags. There is a something which survives deposed princes and which feeds and sustains their parasites. The remains of the inexhaustible sap causes leaves to live on for two or three days on the branches of the upper tree. Then all at once the leaf yellows and dries up, and thus it is with the courtier. Thanks to that embalming which is called legitimacy the prince himself, although fallen and cast away, lasts and keeps preserved. It is not so with the courtier. Much more dead than the king. The king, beyond there, is a mummy. The courtier, here, is a phantom. To be the shadow of a shadow is leanness indeed, hence Barquil Fadro became famished. Then he took up the character of a man of letters. But he was thrust back even from the kitchens. Sometimes he knew not where to sleep. Who will give me shelter, he would ask? He struggled on. All that is interesting in patience and distress he possessed. He had, besides, the talent of the termite, knowing how to bore a hole from the bottom to the top. By dint of making use of the name of James II, of old memories, of fables of fidelity, of touching stories, he pierced as far as the duchess Josiana's heart. Josiana took a liking to this man of poverty and wit, an interesting combination. He presented him to Lord de Rimoire, gave him a shelter in their servants' hall, among her domestics, retained him in her household, was kind to him, and sometimes even spoke to him. Barquil Fadro felt neither hunger nor cold again. Josiana addressed him in the second person. It was the fashion for great ladies to do so to men of letters who allowed it. The Marquis de Maillie received Roy, whom she had never seen before, in bed, and said to him, C'est toi qui a fait la neige à l'ente. Bonjour. Later on the men of letters returned the custom. The day came when Fabre de Glantine said to the duchess de Roi, N'est-ce tu pas la chavon? For Barquil Fadro, to be deed and vowed, was a success. He was overjoyed by it. He had aspired to this contemptuous familiarity. Lady Josiana, these and vows me, he would say to himself, and he would rub his hands. He profited by this being and vowing, to make further way. He became a sort of constant attendant in Josiana's private rooms, in no way troublesome, unperceived. The duchess would almost have changed her shift before him. All this, however, was precarious. Barquil Fadro was aiming at a position. A duchess was half way. An underground passage which did not lead to the queen was having bored for nothing. One day Barquil Fadro said to Josiana, Would your grace like to make my fortune? What does thou want? An appointment. An appointment for thee? Yes, ma'am. What an idea! Thou, to ask for an appointment, Thou, what good for nothing? That is just the reason. Josiana burst out laughing. Among the offices to which thou art unsuited, which dost thou desire? That of cork draw for the bottles of the ocean. Josiana's laugh redoubled. What meanest thou, thou art fooling? No, ma'am. To amuse myself I shall answer you seriously, said the duchess. What dost thou wish to be, repeat it? Uncorker for the bottles of the ocean. Everything is possible at court. Is there an appointment of that kind? Yes, ma'am. This is news to me, go on. There is such an appointment. Swear to it on the soul which thou dost not possess. I swear it. I do not believe thee. Thank you, ma'am. Then thou wishest begin again. To uncork the bottles of the ocean. That is a situation which can give little trouble. It is like grooming a bronze horse. Very nearly. Nothing to do. Well, it is a situation suit thee. Thou art good for that much. You see I am good for something. Come, thou art talking nonsense. Is there such an appointment? Bakil Fedro assumed an attitude of deferential gravity. Ma'am, you had an august father, James II, the king, and you have an illustrious brother-in-law, George of Denmark, Duke of Cumberland. Your father was, and your brother is, Lord High Admiral of England. Is what thou tellst me fresh news? I know all that as well as thou. But here is what your grace does not know. In the sea there are three kinds of things. Those at the bottom, legan, those which float flotsam, those which the sea throws up upon the shore jetsam. And then these three things, legan, flotsam, and jetsam, belong to the Lord High Admiral. And then your grace understands. No. All that is in the sea, all that sinks, all that floats, all that is cast ashore, all belongs to the Admiral of England. Everything, really, and then except the sturgeon which belongs to the king. I should have thought, said Josiana, all that would have belonged to Neptune. Neptune is a fool. He has given up everything. He allowed the English to take everything. Is what thou wouldst say? Prizes of the sea is the name given to such treasure-trolls. Be it so. It is boundless. There is always something floating, something being cast up. It is the contribution of the sea, the tax upon which the ocean pays to England. With all my heart but pray conclude. Your grace understands that in this way the ocean creates a department. Where? At the Admiralty. What department? The sea prize department. Well, the department is subdivided into three offices, legan, flotsam, and jetsam. And in each there is an officer. And then a ship at sea writes to give notice on any subject to those on land, that it is sailing in such a latitude that it has met a sea-monster, that it is inside of shore, that it is in distress, that it is about to found, that it is lost, etc. The captain takes a bottle, puts into it a bit of paper on which he has written the information, corks up the flask, and casts it into the sea. If the bottle goes to the bottom, it is in the department of the legan officer. If it floats, it is in the department of the flotsam officer. If it be thrown upon shore it concerns the jetsam officer. And what's thou like to be the jetsam officer? Precisely so. And that is what thou callest, uncorking the bottles of the ocean? Since there is such an appointment, why does thou wish for the last named place in preference to both the others? Because it is vacant just now. In what dust the appointment consists? Madam, in 1598 a tarred bottle picked up by a man, conger fishing, on the strand of a pedium promontorium, was brought to Queen Elizabeth, and a parchment drawn out of it gave information to England that Holland had taken, without saying anything about it, an unknown country, Nova Zimbia, that the capture had taken place in June 1596, that in that country people were eaten by bears, and that the manner of passing the winter was described on a paper enclosed in a musket case hanging in the chimney of the wooden house built on the island and left by the Dutchmen who were all dead, and that the chimney was built of a barrel with the end knocked out, sunk into the roof. I don't understand much of thy rigmarole. Be it so, Elizabeth understood. A country the more for Holland was a country the less for England. The bottle which had given the information was held to be of importance, and thence forward, an order was issued that anybody who should find a sealed bottle on the seashore should take it to the Lord High Admiral of England under pain of the gallows. The Admiral entrusts the opening of such bottles to an officer who presents the contents to the Queen, if there be reason for doing so. Are there many such bottles brought to the Admiralty? But few. But it's all the same. The appointment exists. There is for the office a room and lodgings at the Admiralty. And for that way of doing nothing, how is one paid, one hundred guineas per year? And thou wouldst trouble me for that much? It is enough to live upon, like a beggar, as it becomes one of my sort. One hundred guineas it's a bagatelle. What keeps you for a minute keeps us for a year. That's the advantage of the poor. Thou shalt have the place. A week afterwards, thanks to Josiana's exertions, thanks to the influence of Lord David de Rimois, Bacchyl Phaedro, safe thence forward, drawn out of his precarious existence, lodged and boarded with a salary of one hundred guineas was installed at the Admiralty. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. There is one thing the most pressing of all, to be ungrateful. Bacchyl Phaedro was not wanting therein. Having received so many benefits from Josiana, he naturally had but one thought, to revenge himself on her. When we add that Josiana was beautiful, great, young, rich, powerful, illustrious, while Bacchyl Phaedro was ugly, little, poor, dependent, obscure, he must necessarily revenge himself for all this as well. When a man is made out of night, how is he to forgive so many beams of light? Bacchyl Phaedro was an Irishman who had denied Ireland, a bad species. Bacchyl Phaedro had but one thing in his favour, that he had a very big belly. A big belly passes for a kind of kind-heartedness, but his belly was but an addition to Bacchyl Phaedro's hypocrisy, for the man was full of malice. What was Bacchyl Phaedro's age? None. The age necessary for his project of the moment. He was old in his wrinkles and grey hairs, young in the activity of his mind. He was active and ponderous, a sort of hippopotamus monkey. A royalist, certainly. A republican, who knows, a Catholic, perhaps a Protestant without doubt. Four Stuart, probably. Four Brunswick, evidently. To be four is a power only on the condition of being, at the same time, against. Bacchyl Phaedro practised this wisdom. The appointment of drawer of the bottles of the ocean was not as absurd as Bacchyl Phaedro had appeared to make out. The complaints, which would in these times be termed declamations, of Garcia Fernández in his Chartbook of the Sea against the Robbery of Jetson, called Right of Wreck, and against the Pillage of Wreck by the inhabitants of the coast, had created a sensation in England, and had obtained for the shipwrecked this reform, that their goods, chattels and property instead of being stolen by the country people, were confiscated by the Lord High Admiral. All the debris of the sea cast upon the English shore, merchandise, broken hulls of ships, bales, chests, etc., belonged to the Lord High Admiral. And here was revealed the importance of the place asked for by Bacchyl Phaedro. The floating receptacles containing messages and declarations awakened particularly the attention of the Admiralty. Shipwrecks are one of England's gravest cares. Navigation being her life, shipwreck, is her anxiety. Information is kept in perpetual care by the sea. The little glass bottle, thrown to the waves by the doomed ship, contains final intelligence, precious from every point of view. Intelligence concerning the ship. Intelligence concerning the crew. Intelligence concerning the place, the time, the manner of loss. Intelligence concerning the winds which have broken up the vessel. Intelligence concerning the currents which bore the floating flask ashore. The situation filled by Bacchyl Phaedro has been abolished now for more than a century but it had its real utility. The last holder was William Hussie of Doddington in Lincolnshire. The man who held it was a sort of guardian of the things of the sea. All the closed and sealed up vessels, bottles, flasks, jars thrown upon the English coast by the tide, were brought to him. He alone had the right to open them. He was the first in the secrets of their contents. He put them in order and ticketed them with his signature. The expression, Loge un papier un cref. Still used in the Channel Islands is thence derived. However, one precaution was certainly taken. Not one of these bottles could be unsealed, except in the presence of two jurors of the admiralty, sworn to secrecy, who signed conjointly with the holder of the Jetsum office, the official report of the opening. But these jurors being held to secrecy there resulted for Bacchyl Phaedro a certain discretionary latitude. It depended upon him, to a certain extent, to suppress a fact, or to bring it to light. These fragile floating messages were far from being what Bacchyl Phaedro had told Josiana, rare and insignificant. Sometimes they reached land with little delay, at others after many years. That depended on the winds and the currents. The fashion of casting bottles on the surface of the sea has somewhat passed away, like that of vowing offerings. But in those religious times those who were about to die were glad thus to send their last thought to God, and to men, at times these messages from the sea were plentiful at the admiralty. Aparchment, preserved in the hall at Old Lane, ancient spelling, with notes to the Earl of Suffolk, grand treasurer of England under James I, bears witness that in the one year, 1615, fifty-two flasks, bladders, and tarred vessels containing mention of sinking ships were brought and registered in the records of the Lord High Admiral. Court appointments are the drop of oil in the widow's cruise they ever increase. Thus it is that the porter has become Chancellor, and the groom Constable. The special officer charged with the appointment desired and obtained by Bacchyl Phaedro was invariably a confidential man. Elizabeth had wished that it should be so. At court, to speak of confidence is to speak of intrigue, and to speak of intrigue is to speak of advancement. This functionary had come to be a personage of some consideration. He was a clerk and ranked directly after the two grooms of the Almanrie. He had the right of entrance into the palace, but we must add what was called the humble entrance, Humilis introitis. And even into the bed-chamber, for it was the custom that he should inform the monarch on occasions of sufficient importance of the objects found, which were often very curious. The wills of men in despair, farewells cast to fatherland, revelations of falsified logs, bills of lading, and crimes committed at sea, legacies to the crown, etc. But he should maintain his records in communication with the court, and should account from time to time to the king or queen concerning the opening of these ill-omend bottles. It was the black cabinet of the ocean. Elizabeth, who was always glad of an opportunity of speaking Latin, used to ask Tonfield of Collie in Berkshire, Jetsom officer of her day, when he brought her one of these papers cast up by the sea, quit me, he scribed Neptunus. What does Neptun write me? The way had been eaten, the insect had succeeded, Bacchifedro approached the queen. This was all he wanted. To make his fortune? No. To unmake that of others? A greater happiness. To hurt is to enjoy. To have within one the desire of injuring, vague but implacable and never to lose sight of it, is not given to all. Bacchifedro possessed that fixity of intention. As the bulldog holds on with his jaws, so did his thought. To feel himself inexorable gave him a depth of gloomy satisfaction. As long as he had a prey under his teeth or in his soul a certainty of evil doing, he wanted nothing. He was happy, shivering in the cold which his neighbor was suffering. To be malignant is an opulence. Such a man is believed to be poor, and in truth is so. But he has all his riches in malice, and prefers having them so. Stirling is in what contents one. To do a bad turn, which is the same as a good turn, is better than money. Bad for him who endures, good for him who does it. Catspe, the colleague of Guy Fox, in the poppish powder-plot, said, To see Parliament blown upside down, I wouldn't miss it for a million sterling. What was Bacchifedro? What meanest and most terrible of things? An envious man. Envy is a thing ever easily placed at court. Courts abound in impertinent people, in idlers, in rich loungers hungering for gossip, in those who seek for needles in trusses of hay, in triflers, in banterers bantered, in witty ninnies, who cannot do without converse with an envious man. What a refreshing thing is the evil spoken to you of others. Envy is good stuff to make a spy. There is a profound analogy between that natural passion envy and that social function espionage. The spy hunts on others' account like a dog. The envious man hunts on his own, like a cat. A fierce myself such is the envious man. He had other qualities. Bacchifedro was discreet, secret, concrete. He kept in everything and racked himself with his hate. Enormous baseness implies enormous vanity. He was liked by those whom he amused and hated by all others, but he felt that he was disdained by those who hated him and despised by those who liked him. He restrained himself. All his gall simmered noiselessly in his hostile resignation. He was indignant, as if rogues had the right to be so. He was the fury's silent prey. To swallow everything was his talent. There were deaf wraths within him, frenzies of interior rage, black and brooding flames unseen. He was a smoke-consuming man of passion. The surface was smiling. He was kind, prompt, easy, amiable, obliging. Never mind to whom, never mind where. He bowed. For a breath of wind he inclined to the earth. What a source of fortune to have a reed for a spine. Such concealed and venomous beings are not so rare as is believed. We live surrounded by ill-olmund-crawling things. Wherefore the malevolent? A keen question. The dreamer constantly proposes it to himself, and the thinker never resolves it. Hence the sad eye of the philosopher is ever fixed upon that mountain of darkness which is destiny, and from the top of which the colossal specter of evil casts handfuls of serpents over the earth. Paquilfedro's body was obese, and his face lean, a fat bust and a bony countenance. His nails were channeled in short, his fingers knotted, his thumbs flat, his hair coarse, his temples wide apart, and his forehead, a murderer's, broad and low. The littleness of his eye was hidden under his bushy eyebrows, his nose long, sharp and flabby nearly met at his mouth. Paquilfedro, properly attired as an emperor, would have somewhat resembled Domitian. His face of muddy yellow might have been modelled in slimy paste. His immovable cheeks were like putty. He had all kinds of ugly refractory wrinkles. The angle of his jaw was massive, his chin heavy, his ear underbred. Every pose and scene in profile his upper lip was raised at an acute angle, showing two teeth. Those teeth seemed to look at you. The teeth can look, just as the eye can bite. Patience, temperance, countenance. Reserve, self-control, amenity, deference, gentleness, politeness, sobriety, chastity, ended and finished Paquilfedro. He columnated those virtues by their possession. In a short time Paquilfedro took a foothold at court. CHAPTER VIII. There are two ways of making a footing at court. In the clouds and you are august, in the mud and you are powerful. In the first case you belong to Olympus, in the second case you belong to the private closet. He who belongs to Olympus has but the thunderbolt, he who is of the private closet has the police. The private closet contains all the instruments of government and sometimes, for it is a trader, its chastisement. Heliogabalus goes there to die, then it is called the latrines. Generally it is less tragic. It is there that Albaroni admires Van Dorm. Royal personages willingly make it their place of audience. It takes the place of the throne. Louis XIV receives the duchess of Burgundy there. Philip V is shoulder to shoulder there with the queen. The priest penetrates into it. The private closet is sometimes a branch of the confessional. Therefore it is that at court there are underground fortunes, not always the least. If under Louis XI you would be great, be Pierre de Rohan, Marshal of France. If you would be influential, be Olivier de Derm, the barber. If you would, under Marie de Medici's, be glorious, be ciliary, the chancellor. If you would be a person of consideration, be Lehanon, the maid. If you would, under Louis XV, be illustrious, be Choisselle, the minister. If you would be formidable, be Lebel, the valet. Given Louis XIV, Bon-Ton, who makes his bid, is more powerful than Louvoir, who raises his armies, and Turan, who gains his victories. From Richelieu, take Père Joseph, and you have Richelieu nearly empty. There is the mystery the less. His eminence in scarlet is magnificent, his eminence in grey is terrible. What power in being a warm, all the nerves amalgamated with all the ordonals, do less work than one so patrocino. Of course, the condition of this power is littleness. If you would remain powerful, remain pity, be nothingness. The serpent in repose, twisted into a circle, is a figure at the same time of the infinite end of nought. One of these viper-like fortunes had fallen to Barquilfidro. He had crawled where he wanted. Flat beasts can get in everywhere. Louis XIV had bugs in his bid, and Jesuits in his policy. The incompatibility is nil. In this world everything is a clock. To gravitate is to assiliate. One pole is attracted to the other. Francis I is attracted by Trébolet, Louis XIV is attracted by Lebel. There exists a deep affinity between extreme elevation and extreme debasement. It is a basement which directs. Nothing is easy of comprehension. It is he who is below who pulls the strings. No position more convenient. He is the eye, and he has the ear. He is the eye of the government, he has the ear of the king. To have the eye of the king is to draw and shut, at one swim, the bolt of the royal conscience, and to throw into that conscience whatever one wishes. The mind of the king is his cupboard. If he be a wreck-picker it is his basket. The ears of kings belong not to kings, and therefore it is that, on the whole, the poor devils are not altogether responsible for their actions. He who does not possess his own thought does not possess his own deed. A king obeys what? Any evil spirit buzzing from outside in his ear, a noisome fly of the abyss. This buzzing commands, a rain is a dictation. The loud voice is the sovereign, the low voice, sovereignty. Those who know how to distinguish in a rain, this low voice, and to hear what it whispers to the loud, are the real historians. CHAPTER IX Hate is as strong as love. Queen Anne had several of these low voices about her. Bacchio Fidro was one. Besides the queen, he secretly worked, influenced, and plotted upon Lady Josiana and Lord David. As we have said, he whispered in three ears, one more than Don Jo. Don Jo whispered in but two, in the days when, thrusting himself between Louis XIV in love with Henrietta, his sister-in-law, and Henrietta in love with Louis XIV, her brother-in-law, he being Louis' secretary, without the knowledge of Henrietta, and Henrietta's without the knowledge of Louis, he wrote the questions and answers of both the love-making marionettes. Bacchio Fidro was so cheerful, so accepting, so incapable of taking up the defence of anybody, possessing so little devotion at bottom, so ugly, so mischievous, that it was quite natural that a regal personage should come to be unable to do without him. Once Anne had tasted Bacchio Fidro, she would have no other flatturer. She flattered her as they flattered Louis the Great by stinging her neighbours. The king is being ignorant, says Madame de Moschèvres. One is obliged to mock at the servants. To poison the sting from time to time is the acme of art. Nero loves to see Locusta at work. Royal palaces are very easily entered. These madre pores have a way in soon guested, contrived, examined, and scooped out at meet by the knowing thing which is called the coutier. A pretext to enter is sufficient. Bacchio Fidro, having found this pretext, his position with the queen soon became the same as with the duchess of Josiana, that of an indispensable domestic animal. A witticism risked one day by him immediately led to his perfect understanding of the queen and how to estimate exactly her kindness of heart. The queen was greatly attached to her lord steward, William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, who was a great fool. This lord, who had obtained every oxford degree and did not know how to spell, one fine morning committed the folly of dying. To die is a very imprudent thing at court, for there is then no further restraint in speaking of you. The queen, in the presence of Bacchio Fidro, lamented the event, finally exclaiming with a sigh, it is a pity that so many virtues should have been born and served by so poor an intellect. Dieu veut y avoir son âme, whispered Bacchio Fidro, in a low voice and in French. The queen smiled, Bacchio Fidro noted the smile. His conclusion was that biting pleased. Free license had been given to his spite. From that day he thrust his curiosity everywhere and his malignity with it. He was given his way, so much was he feared. He who can make the king laugh makes the others tremble. He was a powerful buffoon. Every day he worked his way forward, underground. Bacchio Fidro became a necessity. Many great people honoured him with their confidence to the extent of charging him when they required him with their disgraceful commissions. There are wheels within wheels at court. Bacchio Fidro became the motive power. Have you remarked, in certain mechanisms, the smallness of the motive wheel? Giussiana, in particular, who, as we have explained made use of Bacchio Fidro's talents as a spy, reposed such confidence in him that she had not hesitated to entrust him with one of the master-keys of her apartments by means of which he was able to enter them at any hour. The successive license of insight into private life was in fashion in the seventeenth century. It was called giving the key. Giussiana had given two of these confidential keys. Lord David had one, Bacchio Fidro the other. However, to enter straight into a bed-chamber was, in the old code of manners, a thing not in the least out of the way. Thence resulted incidents. La ferté suddenly drawing back the bed-curtains of Mademoiselle Lafond found inside Sanson, the black musketeer, etc., etc. Bacchio Fidro excelled in making the cunning discoveries which placed the great in the power of the little. His walk in the dark was winding, soft, clever, like every perfect spy he was composed of the inclemency of the executioner and the patience of a micrograph. He was a born coutier. Every coutier is a noctangulist. The coutier prowls in the night which is called power. He carries a dark lantern in his hand. He lights up the spot he wishes and remains in darkness himself. What he seeks with his lantern is not a man, it is a fool. What he finds is the king. Kings do not like to see those about them pretend to greatness. Irony aimed at any one except themselves has a charm for them. The talent of Bacchio Fidro consisted in a perpetual dwarfing of the peers and princes to the advantage of Her Majesty's stature, thus increased in proportion. The master-key held by Bacchio Fidro was made with two sets of wards, one at each end so as to open the inner apartments in both Josiana's favourite residences, Honkaville House in London, Corleone Lodge at Windsor. These two houses were part of the clan Charley inheritance. Honkaville House was close to Old Gate. Old Gate was a gate of London which was entered by the Harwich Road and on which was displayed a statute of Charles II with the painted angel on his head, and beneath his feet a carved lion and unicorn. From Honkaville House, in an easterly wind, you heard the peals of St. Mary Le Bonne. Corleone Lodge was a Florentine palace of brick and stone with a marble colonnade built on pilework at Windsor, at the head of the wooden bridge, and having one of the finest courts in England. In the latter place near Windsor Castle, Josiana was within the Queen's reach. Nevertheless Josiana liked it. Scarcely anything in appearance, everything in the road, such was the influence of Bacchio Fidro over the Queen, there is nothing more difficult than to drag up these spared grasses of the court. They can take a deep route and offer no hold above the surface. To route out a rockallore, a tribole, or a brummel is almost impossible. From day to day and more and more did the Queen take Bacchio Fidro into her good graces. Sarah Jennings is famous, Bacchio Fidro is unknown. His existence remains ignored. The name of Bacchio Fidro has not reached as far as history. All the moles are not caught by the mould-trapper. Bacchio Fidro, once a candidate for orders, had studied a little of everything. Skimming all things leaves naught for result. One may be victim of the omnis-race Scebilis. Having the vessel of the Danates in one's head is the misfortune of a whole race of learned men who may be termed the sterile. What Bacchio Fidro had put in his brain had left it empty. The mind, like nature, appores vacuum. Into emptiness nature puts love, the mind often puts hate. Hate occupies. Hate for hate's sake exists. Art for art's sake exists in nature more than is believed. A man hates. He must do something. Graduicious hate, formidable word. It means hate, which is itself its own payment. The bear lives by licking his claws. Not indefinitely, of course. The claws must be revictualed. Something must be put under them. Hate indistinct is sweet, and suffices for a time, but one must end by having an object. An animosity diffused over creation is exhausting, like every solitary pleasure. Hate without an object is like a shooting match without a target. What lends interest to the game is a heart to be pierced. One cannot hate solely for honour. Some seasoning is necessary. A man, a woman, somebody to destroy. This service of making the game interesting, of offering an end, of throwing passion into hate by fixing it on an object, of amusing the hunter by the sight of his living prey, giving the watcher the hope of the smoking and boiling blood about to flow, of amusing the birdcatcher by the credulity of the uselessly winged log, of being a victim, unknowingly reared for murder by a master mind. All this exquisite and horrible service of which the person rendering it is unconscious, Josiana rendered Bacchio Fidro. Thought is a projectile. Bacchio Fidro had, from the first day, begun to aim at Josiana the evil intentions which were in his mind. An intention and a carbine are alike. Bacchio Fidro aimed at Josiana, directing against the Duchess all his secret malice. That astonishes you. What has the bird done at which you fire? You want to eat it, you say, and so it was with Bacchio Fidro. Josiana could not be struck in the heart. The spot where the enigma lies is hard to wound, but she could be struck in the head, that is, in her pride. It was there that she thought herself strong, and that she was weak. Bacchio Fidro had found it out. If Josiana had been able to see clearly through the night of Bacchio Fidro, if she had been able to distinguish what lay in ambush behind his smile, that proud woman, so highly situated, would have trembled. Fortunately for the tranquillity of her sleep, she was on complete ignorance of what was in the man. The unexpected spreads, one knows not wins. The profound depths of life are dangerous. There is no small hate. Hate is always enormous. It preserves its stature in the smallest being, and remains a monster. An elephant hated by a worm is in danger. Even before he struck, Bacchio Fidro felt with joy the foretaste of the evil action which he was about to commit. He did not as yet know what he was going to do to Josiana, but he had made up his mind to do something. To have come to this decision was a great step taken. To crush Josiana utterly would have been too great a triumph. He did not hope for so much, but to humiliate her, lessen her, bring her grief red in her proud eyes with tears of rage. What a success! He counted on it. Tenacious, diligent, faithful to the torment of his neighbour, not to be torn from his purpose, nature had not formed him for nothing. He well understood how to find the flow in Josiana's golden armour, and how to make the blood of that Olympian flow. What benefit, we ask again, would accrue him in so doing? An immense benefit, doing evil to one who had done good to him. What is an envious man? An ungrateful one. He hates the light which lights and warms him. Zoilus hated that benefit to man, Homer. To inflict on Josiana what would nowadays be called vivisection, to place her all convulsed on his anatomical table, to dissect her alive at his leisure in some surgery, to cut her up as an amateur while she should scream, this dream-delighted Bacchioffedro. To arrive at this result it was necessary to suffer somewhat himself. He did so willingly. We may pinch ourselves with our own pincers. The knife as it shuts cuts our own fingers. But does it matter that you should partake of Josiana's torture with a matter of little moment? The executioner handling the red-hot iron when about to brand a prisoner takes no heed of a little burn. Because another suffers much, he suffers nothing. To see the victim's writhings takes all pain from the inflictor. Do harm whatever happens. To plan evil for others is mingled with an acceptance of some hazy responsibility. We risk ourselves in the danger which we impel towards another because the chain of events sometimes, of course, brings unexpected accidents. This does not stop the man who is truly malicious. He feels as much joy as the patient suffers agony. He is tickled by the laceration of the victim. The malicious man blooms in hideous joy. Pain reflects itself on him in a sense of welfare. The Duke of Alva used to warm his hands at the stake. The pile was torture, the reflection of it pleasure. That such transpositions should be possible makes one shudder. Our dark side is unfathomable. To please exquee, exquisite torture, the expression is in Baudel, has perhaps this terrible triple sense, search for the torture, suffering of the tortured, delight of the torturer. Ambition, appetite, all such words signified someone sacrificed to someone satiated. It is sad that hope should be wicked. Is it that the outpourings of our wishes flow naturally to the direction to which we most incline that of evil? One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to face. In the completely wicked man this exists in hideous perfection. So much the worse for others signifies so much the better for himself. The shadows of the caverns of a man's mind. Josiana, in a plenitude of security the fruit of ignorant pride, had a contempt for all danger. The feminine faculty of disdain is extraordinary. Josiana's disdain, unreasoning, involuntary and confident. Bucklefeder was to her so contemptible that she would have been astonished had anyone remarked to her that such a creature existed. She went and came and laughed before this man who was looking at her with evil eyes. Thoughtful he bided his time. In proportion, as he waited, his determination to cast a despair into this woman's life augmented. Inexorable high tide of malice. In the meantime he gave himself excellent reasons for his determination. It must not be thought that scoundrels are deficient in self-esteem. They enter into details with themselves in their lofty monologues and they take matters with a high hand. How! This Josiana had bestowed charity on him. He had thrown some crumbs of her enormous wealth to him as to a beggar. She had nailed and riveted him to an office which was unworthy of him. Yes, that he, Bucklefeder, almost a clergyman, of varied and profound talent, a learned man with a material in him for a bishop, should have, for employ, the registration of nasty patients trying shards, that he should have to pass his life in the garret of a register office, gravely uncorking stupid bottles encrusted with all the nestiness of the sea, deciphering musty parchmentes like filthy conjuring books, dirty wills, and other illegible stuff of the kind, was the fault of this Josiana. Worst of all, this creature deed and vowed him, and he should not revenge himself, he should not punish such conduct. Well, in that case there would no longer be justice on earth. End of Section 43