Madame de Saverne

by Achim von Arnim

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

But strange men at short notice jumped into her room and stayed there. They would not say a word in answer to her questions and neither did they leave her when it went dark. Now she regretted not having made acquaintance with anyone. She called for the owner of the property. Nobody came. She tried to go out but was driven back by shoulder-shrugging men.

She did not get undressed. She wrote letters to her father confessor and to paternal relations in Lyon but they were incomprehensible as she did not make her situation clear, merely inciting her friends to come to help her. In point of fact, she did not know herself what her situation was, nor of what she stood accused.

Before she finished writing her letters, a carriage drove up and men got out and came to her, binding her with unfamiliar cords while she noticed that one took away her chest and another unlocked her cupboards, proceeding then to read through her correspondence. She wanted to scream. but her mouth was, at that moment, gagged. Now she gave up all resistance, a veil covered her eyes, she was carried downstairs in a man’s cloak and placed in a carriage, which then rolled off with her at top speed.

She often slept with weariness, but the violent jerking of the carriage woke her up again. She was certainly unable to calculate how long they had driven for, when the carriage came to a halt and she was carried up several steps into a room where all the cords were removed and a bed was shown to her near two other beds from which strange, too clever by half, female faces stared out at her. She asked where she was. No-one answered and, with a meaningful gesture, she was admonished to be silent. At this, she was left alone with the two other women who now began to speak and cheekily affirmed that she was at court, for which new position they were pleased.

In the morning she pulled herself together with prayer, overcame her heaviness and sought to make her shrewdness bright and cheery. She was quite composed when that same strange gentleman came in who had paid her a visit that time with the Nutcracker. He was called the doctor by those who had entered with him, who looked like students wishing to give themselves in front of patients an air of experience.

Someone came up to her and asked if the king was the handsomest man in France. She replied: “Not only the most handsome but also the best, though he has many bad servants.” After she had said that, the doctor gave a signal and she was by strong men positioned in a wheel and turned around so frightfully that she thought she would die. Scarcely had she been fetched out when she was asked again about the king. Worn out, she replied: “He cannot protect his many children. God have mercy on us!”

The doctor said the treatment had already helped and to continue it on a daily basis. Her madness had arisen from a sedentary lifestyle, political fanaticism and unrequited love. Now the unfortunate woman collapsed most pitifully. She saw that the charge they had levelled against her was madness and, for that, her wealth and freedom had been taken from her. Who had spread these rumours? She thought about that inconclusively but it occurred to her it might be her spiteful chambermaid. Or was it a fortune hunter?

She soon noticed from the conversation of the doctor’s foolish students that her cult of the king had created an impression that her generosity added to and her loneliness had strengthened this for all of them. But was it not possible to present all this clearly to the doctor? She often tried to, but hardly had she got a few words out when the doctor smiled smugly and condemned her to the terrible wheel.

Her courage grew with desperation. No amount of turning could stifle her loud cries of protest. She was ducked in water but would silence her complaints of cruelty. The doctor explained to his students that this woman was incurable and spoke as he did so truly heartfelt words, full of compassion for her condition. She could not make him angry. He would perhaps have made a capable veterinarian, but an ill fate had put him in charge of people.

She contemplated with a shudder the consequences of explaining herself to him. An eternal captivity seemed to stand before her, and she was now already managing without all creature comforts and was only meagrely and poorly fed. A determination to do away with herself grew side by side with her unspeakable anguish. She had propped her head in deep thought on both her hands when an alien and yet familiar voice made her start.

She sat up. It was the Nutcracker who, he said, could no longer resist the urge to see her. He regretted her fate. She plucked up courage and enquired of him a means of rescue. He remarked casually that there was only one: she could, if she wanted to, marry him. The chief of police and the doctor were his friends and both good chaps, albeit obtuse. He could persuade them to do anything. Her beauty had attracted him to her at first sight. “And my fortune?” she asked slyly, giving him hope and if only to know where it was. “Your fortune,” he continued, “makes it possible for me to give up the disagreeable business I’m engaged in.”

“I cannot live in Paris. Too many dreadful things have happened to me here,” said Madame de Saverne. “Come with me to Avignon. Have you heard of Petrarch’s cave?”

The Nutcracker cried out elatedly that he pined for southern climes, and Petrarch was his favourite poet. Madame de Saverne was pleased. She suggested they could celebrate their marriage there, but he would also need to convince the doctor to accompany them as it was he who had in fact, unsuspectingly, brought about their union.

The Nutcracker declared himself ready for anything. He calculated for her what kind of house they could make for themselves, having weighed up exactly how much money she had. He was so vain he could not believe that such a woman might want to fool him. Soon he came to fetch Madame de Saverne away with him as completely incurable but did not take her to an institution for the feeble-minded, as he told people he would, but to Versailles so that she could go over her things and get everything packed quickly.

She found everything as she had left it, apart from her chest. She packed it all, but not the king’s bust, which she could not now look at without inwardly feeling dread. Her money, for the most part in securities, had been appropriated by the Nutcracker. This prevented her from carrying out her initial plan, which was to take off by herself without him, but whetted her desire for a more complete revenge.

One week later, the Nutcracker came with his Aesculapius, ready to be off. The latter characterized her recovery as an aftereffect of his treatment and of the splendid rotary wheel, which he extolled to her as his own invention.

She thanked him and promised him as his reward in Avignon first prize in the wheel of fortune’s lottery: a young and wealthy in-law. Moreover, she spotted, as they were setting out, the location of her chest and seldom did she let it out of her eyes. On the way she conversed with the greatest of ease on the subject of the police.

The Nutcracker calmly demonstrated to her that this force, since the decline of all workable constitutions, was to be considered the only power in the state, that even the country’s ruler could only rule as it saw fit. All landlords, all servants, all chambermaids were in its employ.

These revelations made the poor woman anxious again. How happy she was to see the papal coat-of-arms again when she was finally back home. Her companions would have to live there, too. She admitted coyly that she wanted to talk before tomorrow with her spiritual director in order to prepare at the same time for her wedding.

The Nutcracker sang the loveliest arias in fervent expectation. He seemed to himself a Petrarch and spoke only of his Laura. He no longer bothered about the chest, which had immediately been stored in a safe place.

When the spiritual director came, Madame de Saverne wept copiously and called him a prophet. He showed her a coin with the head of King Louis on it, but she could not bear to look at it.

“Life is better under the triple crown than under the single one,” said the monk. “I know everything. A brother, who went to Paris to seek you out but arrived too late, has told me everything. Take these two gentlemen tonight to the monastery. Tell them that I want to bless the marriage today in my church according to local custom. Do not yourself speak against it. You can indeed think that I’d rather wed you to the devil than to one of those villains, but I don’t just want to surprise them, I want to surprise you as well.”

How glad the bridegroom was to get the news of the impending marriage. He expressed at the same time the hope of putting the police force in Avignon on a French footing. He promised the doctor the post of chief medical officer over the whole of the province. How imposing he looked next to that beautiful woman in the monastery, and he jumped into the confessional as if it were a branch police station. He had, of course, no sin to confess: the business with Madame de Saverne he referred to as a successful rough wooing.

For his penance, he was given six Our Fathers to pray in a dark place. “He thinks I’m a child,” he said to himself, “and that a dark place might scare me!” He almost laughed when the doctor came to join him in that dark room. They entered a shed that smelt of donkeys, and a door was shut behind them.

“Many a donkey may well have prayed here,” joked the doctor. “I’ll sing six choruses of Marlborough’s left for the war rather than perform this penance. But what’s happening?” he said. “The floor’s moving. Help! Help!”

“An earthquake,” cried the Nutcracker. But the floor moved inexorably faster with each step they took. They themselves trod it into motion for they were standing on the mill wheel of the monastery’s oil mill, which several pairs of donkeys otherwise worked in relays to turn. They had to run in order not to fall down. The mill was turning and, as everything was going full speed ahead, they both panted breathlessly and all became light through the bars on the side where the mill was.

The monk was standing there with Madame de Saverne and asked them if they had not yet finished saying their prayers. Madame de Saverne said that, if she had to wait any longer for her bridegroom, she’d rather take another for her husband, one who’d protect her better against trickery, force and boredom.

The Nutcracker tried to answer her but, hampered by his awful running, he could only make wild and ridiculous noises. The monks in the mill danced about laughing. They could only see the funny side of this and not the suffering of a poor woman that had now been so fittingly avenged by her father confessor. “If that doesn’t help you, then you’re incurably stupid,” he cried to the doctor. “If that doesn’t make you better,” he said to the Nutcracker, “your villainy is terminal.”

Just then a young officer appeared, the brother of the monk, by whom he was introduced to Madame de Saverne. She wondered at this, blushed and said: “We knew each other well, but why did you leave me without any news of you after the death of my husband? While he was alive, I could not, of course, encourage your advances.”

“I thought that you hated me,” said the officer, “and did not dare again approach you.”

“Your modesty was foolish,” said the monk. “You refused to listen to me, and both of you suffered for it greatly. Heed me now and marry today as an act of contrition if that gentleman there has no objection.”

The man on the treadmill shouted: “No! No!”

“He won’t give up even now,” said the monk. “He’ll have to keep treading.”

“Yes, yes, I give up!” the Nutcracker spluttered.

“Well now,” said the monk, “this gracious lady resigns herself to a good fate, and you two sinners shall bear witness to her happiness and later, this evening, be escorted by riders over the border while Madame de Saverne shall rest from all her troubles. As thanks for your endeavours you can hold on to the bust left behind in Versailles. We are going to replace it in the lady’s bedroom with a picture of St Peter.”

How the two witnesses, when taken off the wheel, had seen the error of their ways! How the Nutcracker had had the silky smooth bliss of his married state shattered! The doctor confessed that only now did he know why the rotary wheel was so uncomfortable for mad people; he no longer wanted to make use of it.

The wedding of Madame de Saverne and the removal of the two forced witnesses over the border of the Comtat Venaissin followed, as the father confessor had arranged and provided for.

“Well,” he said the following morning to his sister-in-law, “is the policing of a father confessor more bearable than that of state officials without a conscience? Our fasts are certainly more bearable than the ways and means that such a doctor invents for others without ever trying them out on himself.”

Would that all charlatans, all law-givers experience first for themselves the effect of their stupid notions, like these two gentlemen, before leading us all into temptation and despair!

Proceed to Challenge 1007...