A Surfeit of Mirrors Page 2

  Brian Stableford

  SYMBOLIST TALES

  To the Reader

  (The Preface from “La Canne de Jaspe”)

  I don’t know why my book wouldn’t please you.

  A novel or a short story can only be a pleasant fiction. If it presents an unexpected aspect beyond what it seems to signify, it’s necessary to enjoy that semi-intentional surplus without demanding too much of its consequences, considering them as fortuitously generated by the mysterious concordances that exist, in spite of everything, between all things.

  That is how it is necessary to approach the stories making up the stories comprising “The Black Trefoil” or “Tales of Oneself,” and to enjoy Monsieur d’Amercoeur’s anecdotes. The baroque or singular adventures in which he figures represent him well enough, waist-deep in his semi-secrecy, and if the events they report don’t succeed in amusing you, you will doubtless not remain insensible to the charms of the tender Herculie and will not be repelled by the speech of old Hermocrates. After all, even if “Bluebeard’s Sixth Marriage” and “The Knight who went to Sleep under the Snow” don’t amuse you every much, you might still like the landscapes haunted by those furtive and grave shades, the houses they inhabit and the objects weighed in their tenebrous hands.

  There are swords and mirrors there, jewels, dresses, crystal cups and lamps, along with, sometimes, the murmur of the sea outside, or the breath of forests. Listen to the springs sing, too. They’re intermittent or continuous; the gardens they animate are symmetrical. There, the statues are marble or bronze; the yew-trees are trimmed; the bitter odor of box-trees perfumes the silence; roses grow on the cypress; love and death kiss one another on the mouth; the waters reflect the shadows. Make a tour of the pools. Go into the labyrinth, spend time in the arbors—and read my book, page by page, as if you were a solitary walker, turning over a scarab beetle, a pebble or a dead leaf with the tip of your long, jasper-handled walking-stick, on the dry sand of the pathway.

  Tales of Oneself

  Instead of a Frontispiece

  Of these tales, the title is still what pleases me most, being able to serve as an excuse if one is needed. If not, let each benevolent reader appropriate from these dreams whatever they can, and I shall have had, on top of that, the pleasure of obtaining something of my own.

  I would have liked a few significant emblems for a frontispiece to these pages; one of my friends, a painter, could have designed them. They might have included, for example, a mirror or a seashell, or a curiously-ornamented water-bottle. He would have represented the last in pewter, because I like that metal, which is reminiscent of old humble silver, scratched and intimate: a slightly dull silver, as if tarnished by the approach of breath or if its sheen were tempered by moisture from having been held too long by a warm hand.

  The allegory would doubtless have been further clarified by a conch shell. The sea deposits charming ones on the sand of beaches, among the sickly seaweed, a little water and cockle-shells. Mother-of-pearl, shining here and there beneath their crust, makes the luxurious scars iridescent, and their form has a mischief so mysterious that one expects to hear the Sirens singing in one’s ear. Only the indistinct echo of the sea murmurs therein, and that is nothing but the flow of our blood, imitating the internal call of our destiny.

  But a mirror would certainly be better still. I’m sure that my painter would have garlanded the oval frame with ingenious flowers, and that he would have been able to coil some caducean serpent around the handle.

  My friend was unable to lend himself to my fantasy. His own is not to paint any longer but to live—as I have lived—the long hours of his silence, turned to face his dreams.

  Bluebeard’s Sixth Marriage

  To Francis Poictevin 2

  The Church was completely somnolent. More than enough light came through its discolored stained-glass windows to distract attention from shade that was still inadequate for weeping, so the sparsely-scattered kneeling women seemed to be waiting for a deeper darkness. They remained taciturn beneath their protective headgear: the tall hats of the region, made of soft fabric, which sheltered the naïve faces of young women and almost buried the worn faces of old ones.

  The sonorous concavity of the nave amplified the sound of a shifted chair. From the beams of the vault individual lamps were suspended, and the crown of an old crystal chandelier, its candles extinguished, swung almost imperceptibly. There were flowers and sculpted figures on the capitals of the pillars and on the font, around which droplets of holy water, reverently removed by fingertips in order to make the sign of the cross, wet the pavement.

  An odor of incense conserved throughout the nave a memory of the recent vespers, and its permanence, simultaneously nuptial and funerary, evoked a more distant retrospection of psalmodic obsequies and joyful weddings.

  Perhaps it was because of the time I arrived in Quimperlé that afternoon, when the bells were ringing with a silvery sound, like the cheerful name of the town, in a sunlit sky threatened by rainclouds on the horizon, but in my mind the idea of celebration was predominant, and that ringing represented to me the merriment of betrothals and processions at the crossroads and on the parvis. Sundays elsewhere in the region have a certain pomp and decoration about them, but here it is idle and requiescent instead. The houses are ancient, as if drowsy; people are in the doorways, as if awaiting the passing or return of some joy. The white winged head-dresses are suggestive of ceremony and complication. They sway as girls walk, and their disposition is indented with mischief and embroidered with coquetry; on the heads of the old women, they are simplified and fractured, and go to sleep, nonchalant and a trifle stiff.

  The trees of the mall were aligned in a regular fashion; in the welcoming water of the river their mirage idled, in accord with the day of rest—which was also attested by the boatman sitting on the parapet of the bridge, his legs dangling down, who offered me an excursion on the Leta.

  The languid river was not flowing. It extended between the quays and the trees, then turned slowly, attentive and torpid, between open banks, level with the grass of a meadow dominated, in the distance, by a shadowy forest set against a sky already nuanced by dusk.

  The clock on the bell-tower chimed five o’clock; a leaf detached itself from a small elm, spun, settled on the water and remained motionless there. I went down to the boat and it cast off smoothly.

  The two rowers cut into the smooth and compact water with the strokes of their oars; the angular wake of the boat broadened out to the banks. There, a single blade of grass stirred, or, in a patch of reeds, one alone—the tallest—oscillated for a long time.

  In front of me was the silent avenue of the river, the quietude of its flow or the attraction of its bend; then, the landscape toward which I was heading separated its ensemble as I approached. It divided in two and slid by to either side, in files of trees and meadows, the foliage corresponding or alternating on one bank or the other. Their double passage was reconstituted behind me, if I turned my head to see them: a renewed orderliness and surprise, whose aspect was further modified as I progressed toward that which furnished the raw material of its variety and its changes, which was: meadows of vaporous grass brushed by wisps of mist; roads bordered with poplars, reeds and irises with flexible sword-like leaves. All of it was reflected in the precise water, and, although the daylight was only just beginning to diminish, the silence was that of the calmest of evenings. The marbling of the cloud-patched sky spread opaque metallic plaques over the water, which, weighed down, seemed to be descending between its banks.

  It descended to the extent that the riverside verdure loomed up even more. The proximity of increasingly numerous tall trees imprinted them with an excess of gravity. Porches of shadow were hollowed out there; darkness roofed grottoes, on the threshold of which the final gleam of the sky on the water faded out, and the river went into the forest, all its water ebony, along with the boat, in which I could no longer see the wood of the oars in the hands of the rowers, w
hose gestures were now enigmatic, and seemed to be desperately imploring the subterranean terror of some Styx.

  They had being rowing for a long time, and eventually stopped to rest, in accordance with the curiosity of the location. Then, the boat was neatly embedded, as if welded to its reflection in the petrified water, into which water dripped from the oars, the droplets counting out the silence measured by their scrupulous clepsydra, one drop at a time.

  Perhaps the evening had not so much arrived as I had gone into it. It resided in the forest, and there seemed akin to the heavy riverside foliage. The location was taciturn, and the boat became obstinately sedentary, at a place where the river, broadening out into a lake, seemed to come to an end, black, formless and stable, and, without continuing its course, to deepen indefinitely, superimposing its waves upon one another and accumulating them within itself.

  While the spectacle of my excursion had changed with the increasing dusk, and ended in near-darkness, my mental tranquility had degenerated, through all the nuances of melancholy, into a kind of anguish. I was about to instruct the boatmen to go back, and to quit that solitary basin, which only mirrored a silence that was the soul of shadow, when I perceived a house, off to one side in a little cove. It was sad, enclosed and charming, to the extent that I conceived a desire to go into the garden surrounding it to pick a few of the beautiful roses that were growing there. I would breathe in their odor during my return along the bleak watercourse that had brought me this far.

  A woman came out of a small outbuilding and invited me to visit the dwelling, which she was looking after. Isolation and the difficulty of gaining access to the cottage had, she confessed, deterred purchasers—although, she added, people often came to see the ruins.

  “What ruins?”

  “Those of the château, Monsieur—that of Seigneur de Carnoët, Bluebeard.”3

  Her face was calm beneath her white peasant’s bonnet, and her benign mouth wore a semi-regretful smile. The large cape that enveloped her body fell in grave folds.

  With the immutable costume of the region, she resembled her forebears, and in that singular retreat on the threshold of olden times, she appeared to me as a contemporary of the Sire, legendary in his tragic history.

  His abode!

  And I thought about the high tower, the beautiful dresses with golden embroidery, stained with blood, the supplications of sweet pale lips, the brutal fist twisting the long tearful tresses, the fatal sequels to insidious and tempting wedding ceremonies, the echo of which I had heard in that day’s festival bells, and of which I had respired the memory in the nave of the old Church, along with the incense.

  It was doubtless in a dusk similar to this one that Sister Anne, who had only seen the sun through a dusty haze throughout the day, wept because no one had come for her, for whom the inexorable hour was nigh.

  The high tower from the summit of which the anxious Watcher had interrogated the circuit of the vast horizon of the forest, the deserted roads and the two banks of the river, was the same one whose black debris I had glimpsed in front of me. It was the only part of the ancient château that had survived the collapse of the prideful dwelling, and of its own decrepitude, nothing survived but the section of crude stone wall that loomed up in the shadow.

  It was standing on a mound of grass and moss, cloaked with ivy that was eating away at its base, climbing over it walls, penetrating its joints and spreading out in its fissures, and its solid mass impressed its image on the surrounding forest.

  The surrounding ground was uneven, depressed or raised up according to whether there had been a moat there or a wall. Destruction is various in its character; sometimes, that which falls slowly fades away, gradually crumbling and disappearing, instead of lingering in recalcitrant ruins that resist time, disputing its disintegration and heaping up its fall in a brute mass whose raw material the earth cannot repossess without remaining hunchbacked, deformed by the difficulty it has in reabsorbing them or covering them poorly with its verdure.

  The almost complete obscurity had become a presence, by virtue of the aspect that debris had taken on in order to gaze at me with all the opacity of the old granite mass, which summarized the darkness within itself and gave it form.

  It was impossible that ghosts did not wander around those stones, and I could not imagine them as other than gentle, melancholy and naked: stripped of their dresses, hanging from the wall of the sinister redoubt, where the successive blood of five wives had reddened the flagstones!

  How else could they have wandered than naked, since their beautiful dresses had been the reason for their death, and the sole trophy that their singular husband wanted to retain of them?

  Had not one of them perished—the first—because her dress was as white as the snow that the unicorns in the tapestries of the bedrooms were trampling with their crystal hooves as they moved through gardens beneath castles, drinking from jasper bowls and kneeling before Ladies allegorical of Wisdom and Virtue? Had another not died because her dress was as blue as the shade of the trees on the grass in summer, while the garment of the youngest, who also died, gently and almost without weeping, imitated the hue of the little mauve seashells that one finds on the grey sand of distant shores by the Sea? Yet another had her throat slit. An ingenious artifice had disposed her adornment in such a way that branches of coral prettified the fabric with arabesques, changing the appearance of its shades, in order that a bright pink might be edged with vivid green, and that they might sharpen or soften when it became prasine4 or glaucous. Finally, one—the fifth—enveloped herself in a sheet of ample muslin, so light that by means of overlapping or redoubling, it appeared according to its thickness or transparency to be the color of dawn or dusk.

  All dead, the sweet spouses, with screams, beseeching hands or stupefied and silent surprise.

  The bizarre and bearded Seigneur loved them all, however. They all passed through the door of the manor to the sound of flutes playing beneath the arcades of flowers where, in the evening, to the cry of clamoring horns among the torches and the swords, all come from distant lands where he had sought the out, all timid because he was arrogant, amorous because he was handsome, and proud to confide their languor or desire to the grip of his hand.

  Whatever cheerful, melancholy or sweet memories they had left in the natal dwelling, where, from the bud of their childhood, their abundant youth had bloomed, neither their mothers’ tears not the sobbing of their old nurses had been able to prevent them from leaving, in order to follow, at a distance, the fiancé of their destiny. One leaves everything for love, and, in drawing away, one scarcely turns back to look once again at some ancient palace on the river’s edge, with its terraces in quincunxes, its lawns in guilloches and its trees in rows. Soon, they barely remembered an ancient and pompous house in the corner of the city’s main square, but neither the medallions of the façade from which grotesque faces grimaced, nor the knocker on the old door, which was warmed by the midday sun.

  They forgot the little manor in the midst of meadows, among the pools where the frogs croaked in the evening when it was going to rain, and also the beautiful château and its forest domain. There was even one, who came from overseas, who no longer thought of the abrupt and sandy island whose rocks were eroded and beaches battered by the sea, and which, in winter, was tormented by the wind, persistent against its solidity. She scarcely gave an occasional thought to a certain little sandy beach where she had played with her sister, when the tide was low, and where they had been so frightened at dusk.

  Alas, he only loved them for their various dresses, those meek or haughty wives, and as soon as they had fashioned the fabrics that clothed the grace of their bodies, and impregnated the with the perfume of their flesh, communicating enough of themselves for them to have become, as it were, consubstantial, he killed the unnecessary Beauties with a cruel hand. By means of destruction, his love substituted for the worship of a living being that of a phantom made of her essence, of which the vestige and the m
ysterious delight satisfied his industrious soul.

  Each of those dresses inhabited a special room in the château. The ingenious Seigneur shut himself up, for long evenings, alternately, in one of those rooms, in each of which a different perfume burned. The furniture, matching the wall-hangings, corresponded to the subtle intentions. For a long time, passing his hand through his long beard, sprinkled with a few silver threads, the solitary Lover gazed at the dresses hanging in front of him, in the melancholy of its silk, the pride of its brocade or the perplexity of its moiré.

  Appropriate music was played outside the walls. Around the white dress (O tender Emmène, that was yours!) prowled the slow chords of a languid viola. Accompanying the blue (which was yours, naïve Poncette!) oboes sang. Near yours, melancholy Blismode, a lute sighed, because it was mauve, and your eyes were still lowered. A fife laughed shrilly as a reminder that you were enigmatic in your coral- spiced green dress, Tharsile! But all the instruments came together when the master visited Alède’s dress, a singular garment that had always seemed to clothe a phantom; and then the music whispered, very quietly, that Bluebeard had loved Alède very much. She was Sister Anne’s twin; it was possible to mistake one for the other, and it was both of them that he desired the new wife to resemble—for they are six, those ghosts, who wander in the evening around the ancient ruin, and only the last is clothed.