A Beleaguered City: And Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen

By Margaret Oliphant

A haunting collection of short stories of the living and the dead by the Victorian Era Scottish author of Hester and Miss Marjoribanks.
 
Margaret Oliphant’s stories “of the seen and the unseen” are now considered some of the most remarkable explorations of the supernatural to appear in Victorian times. A prolific novelist, Oliphant said she could produce her supernatural tales “only when they came to me.” And indeed, they carry the eerie power of a visitation.
 
Twilight uncertainties mingle with philosophical depth in ‘The Library Window’; an extraordinary vision of purgatory is presented as modern city life mixed with metaphysical terror in ‘The Land of Darkness’; and the visitations come en masse in A Beleaguered City, Oliphant’s short novel of the returning dead.
 
Like the old Scottish ballads where the dead and the living rub shoulders, these remarkable tales are among Oliphant’s finest work, mixing the subtlety of Henry James with the uncanny strangeness of George MacDonald or David Lindsay.
 
This edition of A Beleaguered City and Other Tales . . . is edited and introduced by Jenni Calder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781847674913

Book preview

Introduction

Margaret Oliphant has been described as ‘one of the greatest writers of ghost stories this country has ever produced’1 and this collection demonstrates why. Her short novel A Beleaguered City and these seven stories have a luminous intensity, a psychological realism and a gripping evocation of place. One of the stories, ‘The Library Window’, rates among the best in the English language. If some of Oliphant’s full-length fiction can, however rewarding, be somewhat daunting, these stories show her at her best, and provide an excellent introduction to her work.

Margaret Oliphant was an extraordinarily prolific writer whose fiction reflects a broad geographical, social and historical perspective. She published over ninety novels in her lifetime, a substantial amount of non-fiction, and many articles, stories and book reviews. She turned her hand to biography, travel writing, history and social comment. Her productivity, unflagging for half a century, told against her reputation. Because she wrote much that was mediocre the fact that she wrote a dozen or so novels and stories that place her in the front rank of Victorian fiction has been largely overlooked.

She wrote with consistent intelligence and an ironic sensibility, with an analytical mind and considerable psychological insight. Henry James said of her that she ‘understood life itself in a fine free-handed manner’,2 and this judgment is supported by the confidence of her style and the generous vigour of her examination of human behaviour. Her work challenged many conventional opinions and she engaged in several of the foremost social and intellectual battles of the second half of the nineteenth century – for example, the position of women, double standards of morality, and Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Although after her early years she spent most of her life furth of Scotland, she retained a strong sense of her Scottish inheritance. Many of her novels and stories are set in Scotland, and many more informed by what Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘a strong Scotch accent of the mind’.3 Her husband’s early death left her as breadwinner of an extended family at a time when there were limited opportunities for women to earn. She made no secret of the fact that she had to write for money, which created a degree of uneasiness in the literary world. She herself acknowledged that she did not have the luxury of perfecting her art. She was never in her lifetime either a popular or a critical success, although she had her admirers and some of her work sold quite well. The generous and affectionate response to the predicament of Walter Scott, also writing his way out of debt and whom she much admired, was denied her.

In 1880, thirty-one years after the publication of her first novel, she published A Beleaguered City, a tale of the supernatural which drew directly on a lengthy visit she made to France in 1871. The novel also arose out of Oliphant’s experience of bereavement, especially the loss of three of her children, two as infants and her beloved daughter Maggie at the age of ten. She was a believing Christian, but not an unquestioning one, and her faith did not offer easy consolation. She responded with interest to the views of sceptics and agnostics, and was fully aware of the challenge to the foundations of Christianity that came from Darwin and others. She was also aware of the more insidious challenge that came from a society that placed its faith in economic and technological progress and the material expression of wealth. These themes come together in A Beleaguered City.

It is a short, compact novel, a novella in Victorian terms, and benefits greatly from this leanness. Many of Oliphant’s longer novels, the product of a contemporary demand for ‘three-deckers’, novels in three volumes, suffer from obvious padding. But A Beleaguered City has an intensity of focus which drives the narrative. This is all the more effective as the story is rooted in the bourgeois preoccupations of provincial France. It is set in the small town of Semur, which Oliphant herself had visited, and narrated by the town’s mayor, Martin Dupin, a responsible, reasonable but self-important and complacent character who finds himself face to face with a phenomenon he cannot explain. First, a darkness descends over the town. Then:

There was in the air, in the night, a sensation the most strange I have ever experienced. I have felt the same thing indeed at other times, in face of a great crowd, when thousands of people were moving, rustling, struggling, breathing around me, thronging all the vacant space, filling up every spot. This was the sensation that overwhelmed me here – a crowd: yet nothing to be seen but the darkness, the indistinct line of the road. We could not move for them, so close were they around us. What do I say? There was nobody – nothing.

The townspeople are forced out of the town by a mysterious pressure and the gates close behind them. What is this pressure, who are ‘they’? It is the women of the town who first understand what has happened, that Semur has been occupied by the dead. The men look for a rational explanation. The women can ‘see’ something which they cannot, that the dead have returned to a community who are concerned with material rather than spiritual values, in order to remind them of the power and necessity of faith. When the people recognise what is going on, the dead retreat and they reclaim their homes. Normality is restored. The tale ends with an ironic comment on the fact that life continues pretty much as before, with the men slipping into their traditional roles and no lasting change in attitudes to the women, in spite of the fact that their spirituality and heightened ability to see the ‘unseen’ have saved the town.

The quality of the narrative owes a great deal to Oliphant’s own fervent wish to believe that the dead survive in some way, and have a role and a purpose. When Maggie died she longed for reassurance that she still existed somewhere. ‘If I could but have a glimpse of her, a word from her how it would comfort my heart,’ she wrote in her autobiography.4 ‘Why should it be a wonder that the dead should come back? The wonder is that they do not,’ comments Lecamus, a leading character in A Beleaguered City. Lecamus is the only man who shares the women’s power of seeing, and he acts as a conduit between the material concerns of the other men and the empathy experienced by the women. He carries an authority from which the women are excluded. But then we get a woman’s account of events, and Oliphant’s quiet irony comes into play as we see the women dealing with the situation, going about their tasks, sensitive to human need. A striking feature of many of Oliphant’s supernatural tales is that women have a heightened perception; and in almost everything she wrote, women have a capability and a prag- matism that is very often lacking in her male characters.

Linked with these different levels of perception are metaphorical patterns of light and dark. They operate strikingly in A Beleaguered City. A dark cloud engulfs the town, but the sun shines beyond it. There are gradations of light and dark, a play of shadows, wavering light cast by lanterns and candles. The light, and lack of it, is palpable. In the moonlight ‘Semur lay like a blot between the earth and the sky, all dark … nothing visible but the line of the ramparts, whitened outside by the moon. One knows what black and strange shadows are cast by the moonlight; and it seemed to all of us that we did not know what might be lurking behind every tree.’ But it is in the account of Mme Dupin, M. le Maire’s mother, that enlightenment comes. Her interpretation of events is phrased in religious terms, but it is essentially about empathy for the weak. ‘This all became clear to me as I sat and pondered, while the morning light grew around me, and the sun rose and shed his first rays …’ Moments later the towers of Semur’s cathedral emerge from darkness.

Behind Oliphant’s stories of the supernatural lie two traditions which clearly influenced her. The Gothic tale had by the early nineteenth century established itself firmly, and had many successors. It had given currency to a language of mystery and metaphors for reality beyond the rational. Nove- lists as different as Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens had drawn on this tradition. It had generated not only stories of suspense, but also tales that looked at the darker and less explainable aspects of human feelings and behaviour. Robert Louis Stevenson was a practitioner of the latter: one of the best-known of such stories is his Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), published some time after Oliphant was well into her own explorations of experience beyond the rational. Indeed, he much admired A Beleaguered City, and wrote her an excited letter after reading it.5

The second tradition was that of the Scottish ballads, with their stark confrontations and uncompromising dilemmas. Conflict is at the centre of these ballads, between good and evil, between rivals, between love and duty, between fate and free will. This kind of opposition is also at the root of Calvinism. The link between the older tradition and the later Presbyterian development is strong; indeed Presbyterianism absorbed something of the elemental psychology of the ballads as well as their emotional power. Oliphant was exposed to both currents, the ballads and Calvinism. In addition, stories of the supernatural, ghost stories, were very much a phenomenon of the Victorian period. This was partly in response to the familiarity of death, an intimate experience in most Victorian families. Stories that evoked a spirit world were a way of retaining links with the dead, of circumventing loss. They were also a way of circumventing repression. They allowed the exploration of emotional and psychological phenomena within a context that partly disguised them.

Oliphant did not believe that the scientific or the mechanistic could provide an adequate description of life, and she held out against what she called ‘the pretensions of science’, that were claiming the possibility of classifying and explaining the whole of life on earth. Science, she believed, was the enemy of the imagination as well as of religion. ‘This poor world requires a vast deal of ballast to keep it steady,’ she wrote. ‘We are not all intellect … and there are other kinds of power recognised among us than even the power of genius, or the inferior gifts of cleverness and talent.’6 She believed that there were aspects of life and nature that could not be explained. These were the province of God, but also of the imagination. ‘Poetry, of all things in the world, must be least influenced by steam-engines and electric telegraphs. The external world is but scenery for the true poet.’7

The stories collected here were all written in the last twenty years or so of Oliphant’s life and they reveal her growing command of the genre, culminating with ‘The Library Window’ which was one of the last things she wrote and can be read almost as an allegory of her own life. All of them play with notions of perception and enlightenment, with literal and metaphorical darkness and light. In each story the pivotal character can see what others cannot. Sometimes this is actual – a door, a window, a figure. Sometimes it is a sensitivity, a moral and spiritual sensitivity, which leads to an insight into a reality beyond the normal.

More conventional is the story, such as ‘The Secret Chamber’, which involves the laying of a malignant spirit by a profession of faith. The hero, when he confronts the family ghost, uses the sword he carries as a religious rather than a military weapon, a cross rather than a blade. But most of Oliphant’s spirits are tormented rather than destructive, and their relationship with the living is highly personal. ‘Old Lady Mary’, for example, is an ironic but ultimately anguished tale of a woman coming to the end of an apparently blameless life in complacent comfort, but then after her death having to face the consequences of a thoughtless gesture. From ‘the other side’ she sees that her self-absorbed action, ‘that last frivolity of her old age’, has rendered her young ward destitute. She realises how ‘she had played with the future of the child she had brought up, and abandoned to the hardest fate – for nothing, for folly, for a jest’. Hell is living with the consequences. ‘In the first anguish of that recollection she had to go forth, receiving no word of comfort in respect to it, meeting only with a look of sadness and compassion, which went to her very heart.’ Oliphant here is reversing the sense of loss. It is not the living who mourn and suffer, but the dead. Lady Mary begs to be allowed to return to the world of the living to put things right, but there is nothing she can do. In the end she is released from the agony of haunting by the love and forgiveness of the victim of her folly. In other words, the fate of the dead is in the hands of the living.

The idea that haunting is the compulsion of a troubled spirit rather than the persecution of the haunted is an ancient one. Just as common is the haunting that is generated by a state of mind. Often the two phenomena exist side by side, and create a psychological relationship of peculiar intensity. Something of this kind occurs in ‘The Open Door’, where the disturbance at the heart of the story is of a more radical and more frightening nature.

The powerfully evoked setting of ‘The Open Door’, not precisely identified but clearly near Midlothian’s River Esk, is a contributing factor. A young boy rides home from school every day past a ruined building in the grounds of his parents’ home. He hears a tormented cry, which he is convinced is the voice of someone ‘in terrible trouble’, and pleads with his father to do something to help. The boy becomes ill, not through fear but through anxiety for the tormented soul. The father is sceptical, and the doctor dismisses Roland’s distress as ‘cerebral excitement’. Neither common sense nor medical science can cope with the chilling experience, and Roland grows weaker. His father turns to the minister for help.

The minister’s successful exorcism is based less on faith than on empathy with a spirit, whether ghostly or living, in trouble. He combines moral and spiritual authority with pity and tenderness. It is this, combined with the innocence of the child which allowed him to ‘see’ – or in this case hear – the unseen that ends the pain. Children often feature significantly in ghost stories, because innocence, a simplicity unadulterated by the sophisticated and the rational, can be the crucial link between the seen and the unseen. There is an undercurrent in much of Oliphant’s work which suggests a tension between empiricism and sorrow for lost innocence, and it is certainly present in this story.

‘The Open Door’ is a story of many layers but at the heart of its success is the way it imposes its own reality. The reality that Oliphant creates is woven out of characters who exemplify the traditional readiness of the Scottish imagination to accommodate the unseen and the unexplainable. She utilises the currents that have contributed to this, the environment, a contentious history brimming with attempts to justify unjustifiable actions, and an uncompromising religion. The contrast with the rationalism of Roland’s father and the doctor, and the suggestion of ordered art and industry that is contained in the Georgian house and its surroundings (in which the ruin itself is an anomaly), underlines the strength of these more ‘primitive’ responses.

Throughout the story are images of light and darkness which reinforce this contrast. When the doctor and the minister, the man of science and the man of God, set out with Roland’s father to investigate the ‘creature invisible’, they are ‘fully provided with the means of lighting the place… three lights in the midst of darkness’. The doctor carries a flickering taper, the minister an ‘old-fashioned lantern’ which shines steadily, while Mortimer, Roland’s father, also has a lantern which produces ‘a stream of light’. He is in the process of transformation from the rational to the spiritual. It is not intellectual enlightenment, the flickering taper of science, that is effective. When it is all over the doctor puts out ‘his wild little torch with a quick movement, as if of shame’ and offers to carry the minister’s lantern. Science was not able to reach what Oliphant called ‘the hidden heart of nature’.

There is a moral imperative in the story, as there is in all Oliphant’s stories of the supernatural. But the story is also about sensibility and sensitivity. To understand ‘the hidden heart of nature’ you have to perceive that it is there, and that it is indeed natural. At the heart of this is the need to make connections between different worlds, in this case of the living and the dead. To achieve those connections you need a particular kind of light, a particular ability to see. In Oliphant’s view, these abilities have a moral and spiritual, rather than an intellectual, source.

The theme is taken up again in ‘The Portrait’, in which a young man’s kindly impulses open him to female ways of seeing. Here, the vehicle is his mother, who died when he was an infant, and is the subject of the portrait of the title. It is significant that he takes the first steps towards perception independently, before he has seen the painting of his mother. He has shown himself receptive. Again, light and shade ripple through the narrative, and their metaphorical role is consolidated by the final sentence: ‘She has passed once more into the secret company of those shadows, who can only become more real in an atmosphere fitted to modify and harmonise all differences, and make all wonders possible – the light of the perfect day.’ Harmony, connections, breaking down barriers, eliminating the dividing line between the seen and the unseen – these possibilities provide undercurrents in all the stories in this collection.

Oliphant pushes her antipathy to science and technological progress to an extreme in ‘The Land of Darkness’. Here is a brutalised landscape reminiscent of Dickens and Ruskin at their most passionate, ‘full of furnaces and clanking machinery and endless work’. The light in this landscape is ‘the fury of the fires’ with men ‘like demons in the flames’. The story, though rather formless, concentrates all Oliphant’s fears about the modern world as an environment in which spirituality is dead, and she can only counter this vision of hell by asserting the continued existence of God.

The story is not one of Oliphant’s best, but it is interesting for a number of reasons. The fictional portrayal of industrialisation is rare in nineteenth-century Scottish fiction, which is curious given the speed and consequences of Scotland’s industrial revolution. But more striking is the kinship with Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, for ‘The Land of Darkness’ strips away the surface of civility and ‘the pretences of a world that can still deceive itself’ to reveal a jarring reality. ‘The only thing that touches you and me is what hurts or helps ourselves’, says the narrative’s cynical guide. His argument is that all the good impulses of humanity are the result of self-interest or hypocrisy. Unwrap men and women from their decorous clothing and the result is the unbounded infliction of suffering and pain. Similarly, the brutal Hyde is unleashed when Jekyll dissolves the barriers of moral restraint.

Light and dark and shades of perception are at the heart of the most subtle and most potent of the stories here. ‘The Library Window’ is one of the few of Oliphant’s stories of the supernatural in which the central figure and narrator is a woman, and it takes us back to the female ways of seeing in A Beleaguered City. This is a story about female sensibility – but the heroine is never named. However vivid her perceptions, however challenging her grasp of reality, she has an unsub- stantiality. Like so many women in the nineteenth century, she is anonymous, hidden. Her physical and mental environments are limited. She spends her days in her aunt’s house, pinned down by traditional female occupations. Her only liberation is when she is ‘afloat in a dream’.

The pivot of the story is a window in the library across the street, the High Street of St Rules (St Andrews). Is the window real, ‘a living window’ as the heroine puts it, or is it painted? She becomes increasingly absorbed by the window, until, late on a June evening, she becomes aware of a ‘faint greyness as of visible space within’. Gradually a room beyond the window takes shape and she sees more and more: ‘one thing became visible to me after another’. But no one else shares her perception. ‘It did indeed bring tears to my eyes to think that all those clever people … should have the simplest things shut out from them; and for all their wisdom and their knowledge be unable to see what a girl like me could see so easily.’

Finally, she sees a figure in the room, seated at a desk, absorbed in writing. Gradually this vision takes over from reality, becomes more real than the life going on around her. The moment when she can see through the library window and watch the figure working at his desk becomes the chief object of her day. She longs to make contact. Then comes an invitation to a party in the library: she is shattered to discover that there is no window in the wall opposite her aunt’s house. Her ‘reality’ is turned upside down.

What makes the story so astonishingly powerful is the continual play of light, the quality of perception, the nature of different kinds of reality. It is in the evenings, the long summer evenings, that the narrator sees most.

…in the evening in June in Scotland – then is the time to see. For it is daylight, yet it is not day, and there is a quality in it which I cannot describe, it is so clear, as if every object was a reflection of itself.

 When the lamps are lit in the house the light outside becomes dim, artificial light challenges natural light. Trapped inside, the narrator is dependent on what she can see outside. But is she looking out or in? Can her perception take her beyond her own circumscribed world? Can she enter another level of reality? Her own grasp of reality is reversed. The room with its mysterious occupant becomes more real than the ‘theatrical illusion’ of the people around her. When she discovers that there is no library window, no man at his desk, she is taken home in a state of distress. Her friends think she is hallucinating. But back in her aunt’s house she can see him again. Later she sits alone ‘in the dark which was not dark, but quite clear light – a light like nothing I ever saw. How clear it was in that room! Not glaring like the gas and the voices, but so quiet, everything so visible, as if it were in another world.’

These changes in the quality of light mark each stage of the story, and are matched by a deepening perception. Finally, the man she watches with such intensity opens the library window and salutes her.

I watched him with such a melting heart, with such satisfaction as words could not say; for nobody could tell me now that he was not there – nobody could say I was dreaming any more. I watched him as if I could not breathe

– my heart in my throat, my eyes upon him … I was in a kind of rapture …

The sexual connotations are clear. This is her fulfilment, but she never sees through the library window again. The story does not quite end here, although in a sense the heroine’s life does. It is briefly indicated that she marries, has children, is widowed, but nothing recaptures the vivid reality of the library window, and nothing can influence or diminish that reality. In other words, the conventional road to fulfilment for a woman means very little to her.

The story is perhaps the most sustained and luminous piece of prose Oliphant produced, and its intensity has a highly personal flavour. Although the narrator herself has no identity, that in itself encourages us to read this as the author’s own narration. There is an underlying irony, in that so fine a story evokes a lost life, the life of the artist and scholar that Oliphant felt had been closed to her through the necessity of supporting and caring for others. Her heroine cannot make the connection with the world of intellectual and creative activity which the man in the library represents. But he has lost a life, too. He is solitary, imprisoned in the library without loving association. This is not a simple story about a woman trapped in a mundane existence, denied the opportunity to develop, but a subtle and complex expression of loneliness and longing.

The moral element in this tense, still drama is present in the heroine’s sensibility. She ‘sees’ the figure in the library not just because she is dreamily dissatisfied with her limited life, but also because she has sympathy and concern. It is a generous emotion that conjures him to life, to which he responds when he finally becomes aware of her. ‘At last he had seen me: at last he had found out that somebody, though only a girl, was watching him, looking for him, believing in him.’ The relationship between the seen and the unseen is two-way.

As in other stories, the gulf between the natural and the supernatural is bridged by sympathy and a spontaneous unselfishness. The significance of this lies not just in the fact that doors, literally and metaphorically, are opened onto new dimensions of experience and imagination, but that the territory of the unseen allows responses that ordinary realities undervalue. Oliphant herself was too much of a realist to be convinced that ‘good’ feelings and actions brought much tangible reward. Most of her novels illustrate the opposite; they are full of women, particularly, whose routes to achievement are blocked, whatever their moral sensibility. Oliphant returned again and again to themes that demonstrated, with insight and irony, that most people did not get what they deserved, and those who reached some kind of fulfilment often had to pay for it dearly. But her stories of the supernatural allow her to break free from this, and provide an entry into a time and space where the better impulses of humanity have some effect. The heroine of ‘The Library Window’ has her moment of intensity and revelation, even if it does not and cannot change her life.

NOTES

1 . Richard Dalby (ed.), The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories , London, 1988, p. 346.

2 . Quoted in Q D Leavis, Introduction, Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant , ed. Mrs Harry Coghill, Leicester, 1974, p. 10.

3 . Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Foreigner at Home’, Memories and Portraits , Glasgow, 1990, p. 16 (first published 1887).

4 . Elizabeth Jay (ed.), Autobiography of Mrs Margaret Oliphant , Oxford, 1990, p. 7.

5 . R L Stevenson to Margaret Oliphant, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson , vol. 2, Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds), New Haven and London, 1994, p. 301.

6 . ‘Modern Light Literature – Science’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 78, p. 319.

7 . Ibid., p. 226.

A Beleaguered City

ONE

The Narrative of M. le Maire

The Condition of the City

I, MARTIN DUPIN (de la Clairière), had the honour of holding the office of Maire in the town of Semur, in the Haute Bourgogne, at the time when the following events occurred. It will be perceived therefore, that no one could have more complete knowledge of the facts – at once from my official position, and from the place of eminence in the affairs of the district generally which my family has held for many generations – by what citizen-like virtues and unblemished integrity I will not be vain enough to specify. Nor is it necessary; for no one who knows Semur can be ignorant of the position held by the Dupins, from father to son. The estate La Clairière has been so long in the family that we might very well, were we disposed, add its name to our own, as so many families in France do; and, indeed, I do not prevent my wife (whose prejudices I respect) from making this use of it upon her cards. But, for myself, bourgeois I was born and bourgeois I mean to die. My residence, like that of my father and grandfather, is at No. 29 in the Grande Rue, opposite the Cathedral, and not far from the Hospital of St Jean. We inhabit the first floor, along with the rez-de-chaus-sée, which has been turned into domestic offices suitable for the needs of the family. My mother, holding a respected place in my household, lives with us in the most perfect family union. My wife (née de Champfleurie) is everything that is calculated to render a household happy; but, alas! one only of our two children survives to bless us. I have thought these details of my private circumstances necessary, to explain the following narrative; to which I will also add, by way of introduction, a simple sketch of the town itself and its general conditions before these remarkable events occurred.

It was on a summer evening about sunset, the middle of the month of June, that my attention was attracted by an incident of no importance which occurred in the street, when I was making my way home, after an inspection of the young vines in my new vineyard to the left of La Clairière. All were in perfectly good condition, and none of the many signs which point to the arrival of the insect were apparent. I had come back in good spirits, thinking of the prosperity which I was happy to believe I had merited by a conscientious performance of all my duties. I had little with which to blame myself: not only my wife and relations, but my dependants and neighbours, approved my conduct as a man; and even my fellow-citizens, exacting as they are, had confirmed in my favour the good opinion which my family had been fortunate enough to secure from father to son. These thoughts were in my mind as I turned the corner of the Grande Rue and approached my own house. At this moment the tinkle of a little bell warned all the bystanders of the procession which was about to pass, carrying the rites of the Church to some dying person. Some of the women, always devout, fell on their knees. I did not go so far as this, for I do not pretend, in these days of progress, to have retained the same attitude of mind as that which it is no doubt becoming to behold in the more devout sex; but I stood respectfully out of the way, and took off my hat, as good breeding alone, if nothing else, demanded of me. Just in front of me, however, was Jacques Richard, always a troublesome individual, standing doggedly, with his hat upon his head and his hands in his pockets, straight in the path of M. le Curé. There is not in all France a more obstinate fellow. He stood there, notwithstanding the efforts of a good woman to draw him away, and though I myself called to him. M. le Curé is not the man to flinch; and as he passed, walking as usual very quickly and straight, his soutane brushed against the blouse of Jacques. He gave one quick glance from beneath his eyebrows at the profane interruption, but he would not distract himself from his sacred errand at such a moment. It is a sacred errand when any one, be he priest or layman, carries the best he can give to the bedside of the dying. I said this to Jacques when M. le Curé had passed and the bell went tinkling on along the street. ‘Jacques,’ said I, ‘I do not call it impious, like this good woman, but I call it inhuman. What! a man goes to carry help to the dying, and you show him no respect!’

This brought the colour to his face; and I think, perhaps, that he might have become ashamed of the part he had played; but the women pushed in again, as they are so fond of doing. ‘Oh, M. le Maire, he does not deserve that you should lose your words upon him!’ they cried; ‘and, besides, is it likely he will pay any attention to you when he tries to stop even the bon Dieu?’

‘The bon Dieu!’ cried Jacques. ‘Why doesn’t He clear the way for himself? Look here. I do not care one farthing for your bon Dieu. Here is mine; I carry him about with me.’ And he took a piece of a hundred sous out of his pocket (how had it got there?) ‘Vive l’argent!’ he said. ‘You know it yourself, though you will not say so. There is no bon Dieu but money. With money you can do anything. L’argent c’est le bon Dieu.’

‘Be silent,’ I cried, ‘thou profane one!’ And the women were still more indignant than I. ‘We shall see, we shall see; when he is ill and would give his soul for something to wet his lips, his bon Dieu will not do much for him,’ cried one; and another said, clasping her hands with a shrill cry, ‘It is enough to make the dead rise out of their graves!’

‘The dead rise out of their graves!’ These words, though one has heard them before, took possession of my imagination. I saw the rude fellow go along the street as I went on, tossing the coin in his hand. One time it fell to the ground and rang upon the pavement, and he laughed more loudly as he picked it up. He was walking towards the sunset, and I too, at a distance after. The sky was full of rose-tinted clouds floating across the blue, floating high over the grey pinnacles of the Cathedral, and filling the long open line of the Rue St Etienne down which he was going. As I crossed to my own house I caught him full against the light, in his blue blouse, tossing the big silver piece in the air, and heard him laugh and shout ‘Vive l’argent! This is the only bon Dieu.’ Though there are many people who live as if this were their sentiment, there are few who give it such brutal expression; but some of the people at the corner of the street laughed too. ‘Bravo, Jacques!’ they cried; and one said, ‘You are right, mon ami, the only god to trust in nowadays.’ ‘It is a short credo, M. le Maire,’ said another, who caught my eye. He saw I was displeased, this one, and his countenance changed at once.

‘Yes, Jean Pierre,’ I said, ‘it is worse than short – it is brutal. I hope noman who respects himself will ever countenance it. It is against the dignity of human nature, if nothing more.’

‘Ah, M. le Maire!’ cried a poor woman, one of the good ladies of the market, with entrenchments of baskets all round her, who had been walking my way; ‘ah, M. le Maire! did not I say true? it is enough to bring the dead out of their graves.’

‘That would be something to see,’ said Jean Pierre, with a laugh; ‘and I hope, ma bonne femme, that if you have any interest with them, you will entreat these gentlemen to appear before I go away.’

‘I do not like such jesting,’ said I. ‘The dead are very dead and will not disturb anybody, but even the prejudices of respectable persons ought to be respected. A ribald like Jacques counts for nothing, but I did not expect this from you.’

‘What would you, M. le Maire?’ he said, with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘We are made like that. I respect prejudices as you say. My wife is a good woman, she prays for two – but me! How can I tell that Jacques is not right after all? A grosse pièce of a hundred sous, one sees that, one knows what it can do – but for the other!’ He thrust up one shoulder to his ear, and turned up the palms of his hands.

‘It is our duty at all times to respect the convictions of others,’ I said, severely; and passed on to my own house, having no desire to encourage discussions at the street corner. A man in my position is obliged to be always mindful of the example he ought to set. But I had not yet done with this phrase, which had, as I have said, caught my ear and my imagination. My mother was in the great salle of the rez-de- chaussée, as I passed, in altercation with a peasant who had just brought us in some loads of wood. There is often, it seems to me, a sort of refrain in conversation, which one catches everywhere as one comes and goes. Figure my astonishment when I heard from the lips of my good mother the same words with which that good-for-nothing Jacques Richard had made the profession of his brutal faith. ‘Go!’ she cried, in anger; ‘you are all the same. Money is your god. De grosses pièces, that is all you think of in these days.’

‘Eh, bien, madame,’ said the peasant; ‘and if so, what then? Don’t you others, gentlemen and ladies, do just the same? What is there in the world but money to think of? If it is a question of marriage, you demand what is the dot; if it is a question of office, you ask, Monsieur Untel, is he rich? And it is perfectly just. We know what money can do; but as for le bon Dieu, whom our grandmothers used to talk about—’

And lo! our gros paysan made exactly the same gesture as Jean Pierre. He put up his shoulders to his ears, and spread out the palms of his hands, as who should say, There is nothing further to be said.

Then there occurred a still more remarkable repetition. My mother, as may be supposed, being a very respectable person, and more or less dévote, grew red with indignation and horror.

‘Oh, these poor grandmothers!’ she cried; ‘God give them rest! It is enough to make the dead rise out of their graves.’

‘Oh, I will answer for les morts! they will give nobody any trouble,’ he said with a laugh. I went in and reproved the man severely, finding that, as I supposed, he had attempted to cheat my good mother in the price of the wood. Fortunately she had been quite as clever as he was. She went upstairs shaking her head, while I gave the man to understand that no one should speak to her but with the profoundest respect in my house. ‘She has her opinions, like all respectable ladies,’ I said, ‘but under this roof these opinions shall always be sacred.’ And, to do him justice, I will add that when it was put to him in this way Gros-Jean was ashamed of himself.

When I talked over these incidents with my wife, as we gave each other the narrative of our day’s experiences, she was greatly distressed, as may be supposed. ‘I try to hope they are not so bad as Bonne Maman thinks. But oh, mon ami!’ she said, ‘what will the world come to if this is what they really believe?’

‘Take courage,’ I said; ‘the world will never come to anything much different from what it is. So long as there are des anges like thee to pray for us, the scale will not go down to the wrong side.’

I said this, of course, to please my Agnè s, who is the best of wives; but on thinking it over after, I could not but be struck with the extreme justice (not to speak of the beauty of the sentiment) of this thought. The bon Dieu – if, indeed, that great Being is as represented to us by the Church – must naturally care as much for one-half of His creatures as for the other, though they have not the same weight in the world; and consequently the faith of the women must hold the balance straight, especially if, as is said, they exceed us in point of numbers. This leaves a little margin for those of them who profess the same freedom of thought as is generally accorded to men – a class, I must add, which I abominate from the bottom of my heart.

I need not dwell upon other little scenes which impressed the same idea still more upon my mind. Semur, I need not say, is not the centre of the world, and might, therefore, be supposed likely to escape the full current of worldliness. We amuse ourselves little, and we have not any opportunity of rising to the heights of ambition; for our town is not even the chef-lieu of the department, – though this is a subject upon which I cannot trust myself to speak. Figure to yourself that La Rochette – a place of yesterday, without either the beauty or the antiquity of Semur – has been chosen as the centre of affairs, the residence of M. le Préfet! But I will not enter upon this question. What I was saying was, that, notwithstanding the fact that we amuse ourselves but little, that there is no theatre to speak of, little society, few distractions, and none of those inducements to strive for gain and to indulge the senses, which exist, for instance, in Paris – that capital of the world – yet, nevertheless, the thirst for money and for pleasure has increased among us to an extent which I cannot but consider alarming. Gros-Jean, our peasant, toils for money, and hoards; Jacques, who is a cooper and maker of wine casks, gains and drinks; Jean Pierre snatches at every sous that comes in his way, and spends it in yet worse dissipations. He is one who quails when he meets my eye; he sins en cachette; but Jacques is bold, and defies opinion; and Gros- Jean is firm in the belief that to hoard money is the highest of mortal occupations. These three are types of what the population is at Semur. The men would all sell their souls for a grosse pièce of fifty sous – indeed, they would laugh, and express their delight that any one should believe them to have souls, if they could but have a chance of selling them: and the devil, who was once supposed to deal in that commodity, would be very welcome among us. And as for the bon Dieu – pouff! that was an affair of the grandmothers – le bon Dieu c’est l’argent. This is their creed. I was very near the beginning of my official year as Maire when my attention was called to these matters as I have described above. A man may go on for years keeping quiet himself – keeping out of tumult, religious or political – and make no discovery of the general current of feeling; but when you are forced to serve your country in any official capacity, and when your eyes are opened to the state of affairs around you, then I allow that an inexperienced observer might well cry out, as my wife did, ‘What will become of the world?’ I am not prejudiced myself – unnecessary to say that the foolish scruples of the women do not move me. But the devotion of the community at large to this pursuit of gain – money without any grandeur, and pleasure without any refinement – that is a thing which cannot fail to wound all who believe in human nature. To be a millionaire – that, I grant, would be pleasant. A man as rich as Monte Christo, able to do whatever he would, with the equipage of an English duke, the palace of an Italian prince, the retinue of a Russian noble – he, indeed, might be excused if his money seemed to him a kind of god. But Gros-Jean, who lays up two sous at a time, and lives on black bread and an onion; and Jacques, whose grosse pièce but secures him the headache of a drunkard next morning – what to them could be this miserable deity? As for myself, however, it was my business, as Maire of the commune, to take as little notice as possible of the follies these people might say, and to hold the middle course between the prejudices of the respectable and the levities of the foolish. With this, without more, to think of, I had enough to keep all my faculties employed.

TWO

The Narrative of M. le Maire

Continued: Beginning of the Late

Remarkable Events

I DO NOT attempt to make out any distinct connection between the simple incidents above recorded, and the extraordinary events that followed. I have related them as they happened; chiefly by way of showing the state of feeling in the city, and the sentiment which pervaded the community – a sentiment, I fear, too common in my country. I need not say that to encourage superstition is far from my wish. I am a man of my century, and proud of being so; very little disposed to yield to the domination of the clerical party, though desirous of showing all just tolerance for conscientious faith, and every respect for the prejudices of the ladies of my family. I am, moreover, all the more inclined to be careful of giving in my adhesion to any prodigy, in consequence of a consciousness that the faculty of imagination has always been one of my characteristics. It usually is so, I am aware, in superior minds, and it has procured me many pleasures unknown to the common herd. Had it been possible for me to believe that I had been misled by this faculty, I should have carefully refrained from putting upon record any account of my individual impressions; but my attitude here is not that of a man recording his personal experiences only, but of one who is the official mouthpiece and representative of the commune, and whose duty it is to render to government and to the human race a true narrative of the very wonderful facts to which every citizen of Semur can bear witness. In this capacity it has become my duty so to arrange and edit the different accounts of the mystery, as to present one coherent and trustworthy chronicle to the world.

To proceed, however, with my narrative. It is not necessary for me to describe what summer is in the Haute Bourgogne. Our generous wines, our glorious fruits, are sufficient proof, without any assertion on my part. The summer with us is as a perpetual fête – at least, before the insect appeared it was so, though now anxiety about the condition of our vines may cloud our enjoyment of the glorious sunshine which ripens them hourly before our eyes. Judge, then, of the astonishment of the world when there suddenly came upon us a darkness as in the depth of winter, falling, without warning, into the midst of the brilliant weather to which we are accustomed, and which had never failed us before in the memory of man! It was the month of July, when, in ordinary seasons, a cloud is so rare that it is a joy to see one, merely as a variety upon the brightness. Suddenly, in the midst of our summer delights, this darkness came. Its first appearance took us so entirely by surprise that life seemed to stop short, and the business of the whole town was delayed by an hour or two; nobody being able to believe that at six o’clock in the morning the sun had not risen. I do not assert that the sun did not rise; all I mean to say is that at Semur it was still dark, as in a morning of winter, and when it gradually and slowly became day many hours of the morning were already spent. And never shall I forget the aspect of day when it came. It was like a ghost or pale shadow of the glorious days of July with which we are usually blessed. The barometer did not go down, nor was there any rain, but an unusual greyness wrapped earth and sky. I heard people say in the streets, and I am aware that the same words came to my own lips: ‘If it were not full summer, I should say it was going to snow.’ We have much snow in the Haute Bourgogne, and we are well acquainted with this aspect of the skies. Of the depressing effect which this greyness exercised upon myself personally, I will not speak. I have always been noted as a man of fine perceptions, and I was aware instinctively that such a state of the atmosphere must mean something more than was apparent on the surface. But, as the danger was of an entirely unprecedented character, it is not to be wondered at that I should be completely at a loss to divine what its meaning was. It was a blight some people said; and many were of the opinion that it was caused by clouds of animalculæ coming, as is described in ancient writings, to destroy the crops, and even to affect the health of the population. The doctors scoffed at this; but they talked about malaria, which, as far as I could understand, was likely to produce exactly the same effect. The night closed in early as the day had dawned late; the lamps were lighted before six o’clock and daylight had only begun about ten! Figure to yourself, a July day! There ought to have been a moon almost at the full; but no moon was visible, no stars – nothing but a grey veil of clouds, growing darker and darker as the moments went on; such I have heard are the days and the nights in England, where the sea-fogs so often blot out the sky. But we are unacquainted with anything of the kind in our plaisant pays de France. There was nothing else talked of in Semur all that night, as may well be imagined. My own mind was extremely uneasy. Do what I would, I could not deliver myself from a sense of something dreadful in the air which was neither malaria nor animalculæ. I took a promenade through the streets that evening, accompanied by M. Barbou, my adjoint, to make sure that all was safe; and the darkness was such that we almost lost our way, though we were both born in the town and had known every turning from our boyhood. It cannot be denied that Semur is very badly lighted. We retain still the lanterns slung by cords across the streets which once were general in France, but which, in most places, have been superseded by the modern institution of gas. Gladly would I have distinguished my term of office by bringing gas to Semur. But the expense would have been great, and there were a hundred objections. In summer generally, the lanterns were of little consequence because of the brightness of the sky; but to see them now, twinkling dimly here and there, making us conscious how dark it was, was strange indeed. It was in the interests of order that we took our round, with a fear, in my mind at least, of I knew not what. M. l’Adjoint said nothing, but no doubt he thought as I did.

While we were thus patrolling the city with a special eye to the prevention of all seditious assemblages, such as are too apt to take advantage of any circumstances that may disturb the ordinary life of a city, or throw discredit on its magistrates, we were accosted by Paul Lecamus, a man whom I have always considered as something of a visionary, though his conduct is irreproachable, and his life honourable and industrious. He entertains religious convictions of a curious kind; but, as the man is quite free from revolutionary sentiments, I have never considered it to be my duty to interfere with him, or to investigate his creed. Indeed, he has been treated generally in Semur as a dreamer of dreams – one who holds a great many impracticable and foolish opinions – though the respect which I always exact for those whose lives are respectable and worthy has been a protection to him. He was, I think, aware that he owed something to my good offices, and it was to me accordingly that he addressed himself.

‘Good evening, M. le Maire,’ he said; ‘you are groping about, like myself, in this strange night.’

‘Good evening, M. Paul,’ I replied. ‘It is, indeed, a strange night. It indicates, I fear, that a storm is coming.’

M. Paul shook his head. There is a solemnity about even his ordinary appearance. He has a long face, pale, and adorned with a heavy, drooping moustache, which adds much to the solemn impression made by his countenance. He looked at me with great gravity as he stood in the shadow of the lamp, and slowly shook his head.

‘You do not agree with me? Well! the opinion of a man like M. Paul Lecamus is always worthy to be heard.’

‘Oh!’ he said, ‘I am called visionary. I am not supposed to be a trustworthy witness. Nevertheless, if M. Le Maire will come with me, I will show him something that is very strange – something that is almost more wonderful than the darkness – more strange,’ he went on with great earnestness, ‘than any storm that ever ravaged Burgundy.’

‘That is much to say. A tempest now when the vines are in full bearing—’

‘Would be nothing, nothing to what I can show you. Only come with me to the Porte St Lambert.’

‘If M. le Maire will excuse me,’ said M. Barbou, ‘I think I will go home. It is a little cold, and you are aware that I am always afraid of the damp.’ In fact, our coats were beaded with a cold dew as in November, and I could not but acknowledge that my respectable colleague had reason. Besides, we were close to his house, and he had, no doubt, the sustaining consciousness of having done everything that was really incumbent upon him. ‘Our ways lie together as far as my house,’ he said, with a slight chattering of his teeth. No doubt it was the cold. After we had walked with him to his door, we proceeded to the Porte St Lambert. By this time almost everybody had re- entered their houses. The streets were very dark, and they were also very still. When we reached the gates, at that hour of the night, we found them shut as a matter of course. The officers of the octroi were standing close together at the door of their office, in which the lamp was burning. The very lamp seemed oppressed by the heavy air; it burnt dully, surrounded with a yellow haze. The men had the appearance of suffering greatly from cold. They received me with