>The Choosing of the Bride

Hoffmann was a two-sided, schizophrenic kind of man; by day a decent citizen and a lawyer, by night a fantasist with a strong penchant for the freakish and weird. Temperamentally he was an anarchic humorist, and this affected his daytime side: his final experience with the Prussian state and legal system in which he earned his living was an official inquiry into allegations that he had abused his membership of a judicial commission to satirize the commission’s proceedings. He took care of the split between bourgeois and artist by indulgence in what were in his day called ‘habits of intemperance’; when he was forty-six these in turn took care of him. He was laden with talent: his earliest ambition was to be a graphic artist and painter; he then attempted to exist as a composer and critic of music; and it was only in his thirties that he turned himself into a writer of fiction and became – with four novels and about fifty stories, most of them of novella length – among the best-known and most admired and influential authors of his time. Long before his death he was the kind of author anyone who reads at all reads. His two-sided, schizophrenic type of personality informs all his fictions. A high proportion of the central characters of his tales are demented, either permanently (as is, for example, Nathaniel in The Sandman) or temporarily, under the impact of events their minds cannot handle. Like the other German Romantic writers, he habitually allows his heroes to lose control of themselves and run raving; but, unlike most of his contemporaries, he has a sense of humour always at hand to puncture the pretensions of these hysterics. The Enlightenment too is the subject of gentle mockery: into naturalistic scenes, often set in Berlin and described with the aid of real street names, names of restaurants, etc., there obtrude supernatural and fantastic events which are left unexplained (often it is suggested that, since the Enlightenment does not allow them, they cannot have happened). The Establishment is the subject of mockery not at all gentle: lawyers, civil servants, businessmen and their wives are represented as idiots. However, Hoffman’s literary technique was not always equal to the demands he made of it, nor was his vocabulary always adequate to the depiction of the so-called abnormal psychological states (normal enough to Hoffmann, it seems) he wanted to portray.

Hoffmann was born in Königsberg on 24 January 1776 and baptized Ernst Theodor Wilhelm; he later substituted Amadeus for Wilhelm out of admiration for Mozart. His father was an advocate and his whole background that of the Prussian state service. When he was three his parents separated and he was brought up – or, as he himself says, not brought up – by an uncle. From 1792 to 1795 he studied law at Königsberg; he also gave music lessons – he had already studied music, drawing and painting – and fell in love with one of his pupils, Cora Hatt, who returned his love but was, inconveniently for both of them, married. This might not be a serious obstacle now, but in Hoffmann’s day it was a Berlin Wall and, after practising law in Königsberg for not much more than six months, he fled to Glogau in an effort to break with Frau Hatt. From Glogau he went in 1798 to Berlin, and in 1800 he was sent as a member of the Prussian governmental apparatus to Posen. Here Hoffmann’s Hyde persona made its first serious mistake: he drew a number of unflattering caricatures of the leading personalities of Posen, including the commandant of the military garrison, General von Zastrow. The general failed to see the humour of it and protested to Berlin about Hoffmann’s continuing presence; as a consequence, Hoffmann was re-posted to the village of Plozk on the Vistula – a demotion he regarded as a virtual banishment. Before leaving Posen, however, he married a Polish girl, Michaelina Trzynska.

He spent four years at Plozk; while he was there his first published work – A Letter from a Cloistered Monk to his Friend in the Capital – appeared anonymously in Kotzebue’s magazine, the Freimütige (Berlin, 9 September 1803). He was also working hard at painting and composition, and his application in these fields bore fruit when, having been transferred to Warsaw in 1804, he was able to complete, among other things, an opera to a text by Brentano, Die lustigen Musikanten (1804), and a symphony (1806), and to design and redecorate rooms in the restored Mniszeksche Palace (also 1806). On the title page of the Lustigen Musikanten he signed himself E.T. A. for the first time. On 28 November 1806 Warsaw was occupied by the French and Hoffmann became jobless and, when his house was requisitioned a little later by the occupying forces, homeless. His case was common among the members of the former Prussian bureaucracy, who had lost their livelihood through the victories of Napoleon; what was uncommon was that he could look for work in the artistic sphere, and especially in the theatre and opera house. In 1807 he completed a second full-length opera, Love and Honour, based on Calderon’s La Banda y la flor. Then, back in Berlin, he began a (fortunately brief) period of near-starvation: he wrote to his friend, Gottlieb von Hippel, on 7 May that for five days he had eaten nothing but bread; but he had already made contact with the theatre at Bamberg with the object of obtaining the post of musical director and in-house composer, and the director of the theatre, Count Julius von Soden, was favourably inclined towards him, though he had to compose an opera to a text by Soden, The Draught of Immortality, as a proof of his abilities. In September he went to Bamberg and was appointed musical director, but after the failure of the first production he conducted there – that of Berton’s Aline, Queen of Golconda – he relinquished the post and stayed on only as composer of stage-music and ballets.

He was again reduced to giving music lessons and again fell in love with one of his pupils, Julia Merc. This time it was Hoffmann who was married. His attachment to Julia Merc was pathologically serious, and he was led to thoughts of suicide by the insuperability of the difficulties in the way of making her his. But by this time he was definitely directing his mind towards authorship: Ritter Gluck appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung for 15 February 1809, and on 17 May the A.M.Z. published his first critical review (of Friedrich Witt’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies); other stories, mostly with a musical setting, appeared during succeeding years, and on 18 March 1813 Hoffmann signed a contract for his first book, Fantasie-stücke in Callots Manier, a collection of tales and musical reviews and fantasies.

Things were now at last beginning to look up for E. T. A. Hoffmann. During the historic year 1812 he began his opera Undine, which was to prove his only real success in the theatre and which still survives in Germany as a minor classic of the early Romantic period. In February 1813 the impresario Joseph Seconda offered him the post of musical director at Leipzig, a position he took up in May, at just the time Richard Wagner was being born there. Hoffmann indeed came to know the theatre-loving Karl Friedrich Wagner, the legal (though not, it seems, actual) father of Richard, and later established a firm and long-lasting friendship with Karl Friedrich’s brother Adolf Wagner, who, as Uncle Adolf, plays a significant role in the early biography of his nephew. Richard Wagner was, as a youth, an avid reader and boundless admirer of Hoffmann, whose stories, he said, gave him bad dreams, but he seems not to have known that Hoffmann and Uncle Adolf were close friends. In 1814 Hoffmann began his first novel, Die Elexiere des Teufels; and, when the government service revived in the wake of Napoleon’s retreat, he returned to Berlin and his Jekyll side resumed its career, though Hyde continued to write musical criticism under the pseudonym ‘Johannes Kreisler, Kapellmeister’.

The year 1816 was a decisive year: Undine was performed in Berlin to great applause, and through it Hoffmann acquired the friendship of Weber, who wrote a laudatory review; the first volume of Nachtstücke, the earliest collection of genuinely ‘Hoffmannesque’ tales, appeared; and Hoffmann was appointed a councillor of the Kammergericht (court of appeal). Fiction now followed in an unbroken stream of productivity, and by February 1819 he could bring out the first of the four volumes of his second and greater collection of stories, the Serapions-Brüder. His second novel, Klein Zaches, had already appeared, and at the end of the year he published the first volume of his third novel, Kater Murr.

In September 1819 the government instituted a Commission for the Investigation of Treasonable Organizations and Other Dangerous Activities, and Hoffmann was appointed to it. All went well until at the turn of the year 1821–2 Hyde again committed exactly the same kind of indiscretion that had got him thrown out of Posen: he told several of his friends that he had inserted into the novel he was then working on, Meister Floh, a satire on the proceedings of the Commission of which he was himself a member. This interesting intelligence came to the ears of the president of the Ministry of Police, Herr Karl Albert von Kamptz, who acted at once: at the request of Prussia, the manuscript of the book, the parts already printed and Hoffmann’s correspondence with his publisher, Wilmans of Frankfurt, were seized by the Frankfurt Senate and transported to Berlin, where, when he studied them, von Kamptz was unamused to recognize in ‘Geheimer Hofrat Knarrpanti’ the lineaments of his own important person. Hoffmann was now subjected to a judicial examination by the president of the Kammergericht, after which he dictated a detailed defence of what, to the official eye, looked very much like an attempt to undermine the work of the Commission by making it seem ridiculous. Prussia in 1822 was in many respects a liberal and free society, but Hoffmann’s offence was no laughing matter: if proceedings had gone forward, Hoffmann-Jekyll would almost certainly have discovered that Hoffmann-Hyde had ruined him. That they did not go forward was due entirely to the fact that Hoffmann was ill: his habits of intemperance, grown to the point at which they had become self-destructive, had brought on the inability to control the limbs known as locomotor ataxia, which was the formal cause of his death on 25 June. To have escaped prosecution by dying was a very Hoffmannesque thing for him to have done.

The first collected edition of Hoffmann’s writings was published between 1827 and 1839, and most of his fiction has never been out of print since. The eight stories in this collection are among his best-known. Mademoiselle de Scudery is often considered his masterpiece and has thus been placed first; the others are in order of publication.

Das Fräulein von Scuderi was written during 1818, published in September 1819 in the Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet for 1820 and reprinted in 1820 in the third volume of the Serapions-Brüder. It is a detective story, embodying most of the tricks of the genre supposedly invented by Poe in The Murders in the Rue Morgue twenty-two years later. Hoffmann came to learn of Cardillac from Wagenseil’s Nuremberg Chronicle and was probably drawn to him through recognizing in his double-sidedness a bloodstained reflection of his own.

Der Sandmann was written probably during 1815 and published in 1816 as the first story of the first volume of Nachtstücke. It forms the basis of the first act of Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

Der Artushof was written between 14 February and the beginning of March 1815, published in November 1816 in Brockhaus’s yearbook Urania and reprinted in 1819 in the first volume of the Serapions-Brüder. Traugott, the businessman turned painter, is again a self-portrait, though this time a happy and modestly self-deprecating one.

Rat Krespel was written in 1816 and sent on 22 September for publication in Fouqué’s Frauentaschenbuch, where it appeared in the edition for 1818 (Hoffmann was too late for the 1817 edition). In its original form the story was enclosed within a supposed letter and was published under the title A Letter from Hoffmann to Baron de la Motte Fouqué. It was reprinted in 1819, this time embedded in the conversation at the Serapion Club, as the first story of the first volume of the Serapions-Brüder. Hoffmann himself is again the central figure, now in grotesque caricature; Antonia is an idealized Julia Merc. The story forms the basis of the third act of Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffmann.

Das Majorat was written in 1817 and published in the same year in the second volume of Nachtstücke. The sinister Castle R… is a real place: Runsitten, on the Kurisches Haff on the Baltic coast.

Doge und Dogaressa, written in 1817, was published in October 1818 in the Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet for 1819 and reprinted in 1819 in the second volume of the Serapions-Brüder. The story of the conspiracy of the Doge Marino Falieri is, of course, historical – ‘one of the most remarkable events in the annals of the most singular government, city, and people of modern history’ (Byron).

Die Bergwerke zu Falun was written during 1818 and 1819 and published in 1819 in the second volume of the Serapions-Brüder. The story is a fantasy founded on a real event: the discovery in 1719 at Falun in Sweden of the body of a miner buried in a mine-collapse nearly fifty years previously; it had been perfectly preserved beneath the earth and is supposed to have been recognized by an aged woman who claimed to have been the miner’s lover half a century before. Wagner had the idea of basing an opera on Hoffmann’s story and drafted a three-act scenario (March 1842) before being diverted, no doubt fortunately, to the subject of Tannhäuser.

Die Brautwahl, written in 1819, appeared in November that year in the Berlinische Taschen-Kalender; it was revised in mid-1820 and the revised version included in the third volume of the Serapions-Brüder published in the same year.

The English version of these eight tales of Hoffmann is a work of collaboration. Stella and Vernon Humphries translated Doge and Dogaressa. Sally Hayward translated Mademoiselle de Scudery, The Entail and The Mines at Falun, and I revised her translations. I translated The Sandman, The Artushof, Councillor Krespel and The Choosing of the Bride.

In helping to produce these new English versions of some of Hoffmann’s best stories, I have sometimes felt the need to ‘editorialize’. Hoffmann well knew how to evoke and maintain tension, but he did so, of course, in the idiom, and above all at the tempo, of his own age; this tempo was somewhat slower than ours, and it seemed to me that, for a story to produce, in modern English, the effect intended by the author, some speeding up and tightening up was sometimes called for. How far one should go in this interference can, I think, be only a matter of subjective judgement and ‘feel’ as one proceeds through the story; and its justification can lie only in whether or not it succeeds in its objective – whether, that is, the story affects the reader of today in the way in which, so far as one can tell, it affected Hoffmann’s many thousands of readers in his own day. His aim, as a writer of fiction, was to give pleasure; and ours is nothing else.

MADEMOISELLE DE SCUDERY

A tale from the age of Louis XIV

It was in the Rue St Honoré that the little house was situated which Madeleine de Scudery, famous for her charming poems, occupied by the grace and favour of Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon.

Towards midnight – it would have been in the autumn of the year 1680 – there was a sudden violent hammering on the door, which echoed through the whole hall. Baptiste, who acted as cook, footman and doorman in Madeleine’s small household, had gone to the country for his sister’s wedding, and so it happened that only Madeleine’s maid, Martinière, was in the house and still awake.

She listened to the persistent knocking… she remembered that Baptiste was away and that she and Mademoiselle were alone and unprotected; all the crimes ever committed in Paris – burglary, theft, murder – rushed through her mind. She was certain that a mob of cutthroats, having heard the house was unguarded, was rampaging outside, and so she remained in her room, quailing and quaking – and cursing Baptiste and his sister’s wedding.

Down below, the knocking still thundered on and it seemed to her as if a voice were calling at intervals: ‘For Christ’s sake, open the door! Open up!’

Finally, with growing anxiety, Martinière seized the candlestick with its lighted candle and ran out into the hall; there she could make out quite clearly the voice of whoever was knocking: ‘For Christ’s sake, open up!’

‘Indeed,’ thought Martinière, ‘no robber would talk like that. Who knows, it may be someone being pursued who is seeking refuge with my mistress: she is known for her good deeds. But one can’t be too careful!’

She opened a window and called down, asking who was banging on the door at that hour of the night and waking everybody up… and trying as hard as possible to make her deep voice sound as masculine as it could. In the glimmer of moonlight which had just broken through the dark clouds she became aware of a tall figure enveloped in a light grey cloak and a broad-brimmed hat pulled well down over his eyes. She now called out more loudly, so that the figure down below could hear: ‘Baptiste, Claude, Pierre! Get up and go and see immediately what ne’er-do-well is trying to knock the house down!’

Then the voice came up from below with a softer, almost pleading tone: ‘Ah! Martinière, now I know it’s you, dear lady, hard as you have tried to disguise your voice. I also know that Baptiste has gone into the country and you are alone with your mistress in the house. Just open the door for me without delay, don’t be afraid! I absolutely must have a talk with your mistress, right this minute.’

‘What are you thinking of?’ replied Martinière. ‘Do you think my mistress would want to talk to you in the middle of the night? Don’t you realize she has been asleep for ages and I wouldn’t wake her up at any price!’

‘I know,’ said the figure below, ‘that your mistress has just this minute laid aside the manuscript of her novel Clelia, which she is working on so tirelessly, and is just now writing some verses which she is thinking of reading to the Marquise de Maintenon in the morning. I beseech you, Madame Martinière, have compassion and open the door for me. An unfortunate fellow’s salvation from ruin depends upon it; the honour, freedom, indeed the life of someone depends on this moment; I must speak to your mistress. Just think how your mistress’s wrath would fall on you for ever if she were to learn that it was you who stony-heartedly turned away from her door an unfortunate fellow who came to beg for her help.’

‘But why do you want to beg my mistress’s sympathy at this unearthly hour? Come back in the morning at a more suitable time!’ rejoined Martinière. From below there came: ‘Does fate come back at a certain time on a certain day when it strikes like the fatal flash of lightning? Is help to be delayed when rescue depends on a moment? Open the door for me! You have nothing to fear from a poor unprotected wretch, abandoned by the world, pursued and harassed by a terrible destiny, who wants only to implore your mistress to save him from his impending doom!’

Martinière heard the figure below sob and groan with pain at these words; the tone of his voice was, moreover, that of a young man, and it reached her very heart. Moved to her soul, she went and fetched the key.

Hardly had she opened the door when the figure pushed his way violently in, strode past Martinière into the hall, and cried wildly: ‘Take me to your mistress!’

Martinière lifted the candlestick on high and the flickering light fell on a deathly pale, fearfully distorted youthful countenance; and she would have liked to sink to the ground in terror when, as the man now threw back his cloak, the shining handle of a stiletto glinted at his belt. The man looked at her with angrily flashing eyes and cried, more fiercely than ever: ‘Take me to your mistress, I tell you!’

Now Martinière believed Mademoiselle to be in the most dire peril; all the affection she felt for her dear mistress welled up passionately within her and engendered a courage of which she would not have thought herself capable. Quickly she slammed the door of her chamber, which she had left open, stood before it, and said firmly: ‘In faith, your wild conduct here inside the house does not suit with the plaintive words you used outside. I was wrong to feel sorry for you. My mistress should not and shall not speak to you now. If you had no wickedness in mind you would not shun the daylight. Come back in the morning.’

The man breathed a deep sigh, fixed Martinière with a terrible look, and reached for his stiletto. Martinière silently committed her soul to the Lord; yet she stood unflinching and looked the man bravely in the eye, pressing herself more firmly against the door through which the man would have to go to gain access to her mistress.

‘Let me see your mistress, I say!’ cried the man again.

‘Do what you will,’ replied Martinière, ‘I am not moving from here – just finish the evil deed you have begun. You will meet a degrading death in the Place de Grève – you and your wicked friends!’

‘Ha!’ cried the man. ‘You are right, Martinière! I do look like a murderer!’ And with that he drew the stiletto.

‘Jesus!’ cried the poor woman, expecting the death blow; but at that moment she heard the clink of weapons and the tread of horses’ hooves out in the street. ‘Constables! Constables! Help! Help!’ shrieked Martinière.

‘You dreadful woman, do you want to ruin me? Now all is up with me! Here, take this! Take it! Give it to Mademoiselle now, today… in the morning – whenever you like!’ So saying, the man snatched the candlestick from Martinière, extinguished the candle, and pressed a small box into her hands. ‘For your salvation’s sake, give the box to Mademoiselle!’ he cried, and rushed from the house.

Martinière had slipped to the floor; now she stood up again and felt her way in the darkness back to her room, where, quite exhausted and incapable of another sound, she sank into the armchair. Then she heard the rattle of a key: she must have left it in the house door. Soft, uncertain footsteps approached the apartment… Spellbound, without strength to move, she waited for the worst… As the door opened, she recognized in the light of the lantern the face of honest Baptiste. He looked bewildered and deathly pale.

‘For heaven’s sake!’ he began. ‘For heaven’s sake, Madame Martinière, tell me what has happened! – I don’t know what it was, but something dragged me away from the wedding yesterday evening! I was back on the road when I met a patrol, horsemen and infantry, armed to the teeth. They stopped me and didn’t intend to let me go; but as luck would have it, Desgrais was with them, the Lieutenant Constable – he knows me well enough. “Eh! Baptiste, what are you doing out here at night?” he says. “You must stay at home and keep guard. It’s dangerous out here. We think we may still make a good catch tonight!”… You will hardly believe, Madame Martinière, how those words terrified me. Then, when I reached our doorstep, a cloaked figure darted out of the house with a drawn stiletto and sent me flying! The house was open, the key was in the lock. Tell me, what does all this mean?’

Martinière, no longer in fear for her life, related all that had happened. Then she and Baptiste went together into the hall. They found the candlestick on the floor where the stranger had dropped it as he fled.

‘It is only too obvious,’ said Baptiste, ‘that our Mademoiselle was to have been robbed and probably murdered. You told me the man knew you were alone with Mademoiselle… indeed, that she was still awake and at her writing. For certain he was one of those accursed scoundrels who get into houses and spy out everything that may be useful to them in their devilish designs. And that little box, Madame Martinière – that I think we shall throw into the Seine at its deepest spot – who knows, it may be some mad attempt on our mistress’s life, so that when she opens it she drops dead, like old Marquis de Tournay when he opened that letter he received from someone he didn’t know!’

After a lengthy consultation, the faithful couple finally resolved to tell their mistress everything in the morning and, after due warning, to hand over to her the mysterious box.

Baptiste’s fears were well founded. Paris was at that time the scene of horrific atrocities; the agent of them, one of the most devilish inventions of Hell. Herr Glaser, a German apothecary and the finest chemist of his time, occupied himself – a frequent temptation for people of learning – with alchemical experiments. His aim was to discover the philosopher’s stone. An Italian named Exili had apprenticed himself to him; to learn the art of alchemy, however, was only a pretext; the mixing, boiling and sublimation of poisons was his real objective, and he at last succeeded in preparing a fine potion, odourless and tasteless, quickly fatal or killing slowly, and leaving behind no trace in the human body. Exili went to work very discreetly, yet still he fell under suspicion and was taken to the Bastille, where he was shortly afterwards joined in his cell by Captain Godin de Sainte Croix. Sainte Croix had long been living with the Marquise de Brinvillier in a relationship which had brought shame on her whole family; finally, as the Marquis himself remained indifferent to his wife’s crimes, her father, Dreux d’Aubray, a Civil Lieutenant of Paris, had compelled the miscreants to separate by means of a warrant of arrest served on the Captain. Characterless, inclined to depravity from his youth up, jealous and revengeful without limit, Sainte Croix could have encountered nothing more to his liking then Exili’s devilish secret: he thought to possess in it the power to exterminate all his enemies. He became Exili’s eager pupil, and he soon equalled his master, so that when he was released from the Bastille he was quite capable of working on his own.

Marquise de Brinvillier was a degenerate; under the influence of Sainte Croix she became a monster. With his aid she poisoned her own father, then her two brothers, and finally her sister; her father she killed for reasons of revenge, the others so as to obtain their inheritance. As the histories of other poisoners show, this kind of crime can become an irresistible passion: such poisoners have then killed people whose life or death must have been a matter of perfect indifference to them. So it was that the sudden death of several paupers in the Hôtel Dieu subsequently gave rise to the suspicion that the bread which the Marquise distributed there weekly as evidence of her piety had been poisoned. It is certain, however, that she poisoned the pigeon pies which she set before her guests on one occasion: the Chevalier de Guet and several others fell victim to that hellish repast.

Sainte Croix, his assistant La Chaussée, and the Marquise for a long time concealed their gruesome crimes behind an impenetrable veil: yet, fiendish though their craftiness was, the eternal power of Heaven had resolved to punish these evildoers while they were still on earth!

The poisons Sainte Croix prepared were so fine that if the powder – poudre de succession the Parisians called it – lay open while being prepared, a single breath sufficed for instant death; for this reason Sainte Croix always wore a mask of fine glass when carrying out this operation, and when one day it fell off as he was about to pour a prepared powder into a phial and he breathed in the poisonous dust, he fell dead on the instant. As he had died without heirs, the court hastened to take charge of his estate; there, locked in a case, they found his whole fiendish arsenal of poisons; and they also discovered letters from the Marquise which left no doubt as to her complicity in his crimes. She fled to a convent in Liège. A law officer, Desgrais, was sent after her: disguised as a priest, he presented himself at the convent where she was in hiding and soon succeeded in entering into an amorous intrigue with her. Enticed to a secret meeting place in a lonely garden outside the town, she was surrounded by Desgrais’s men-at-arms, her priestly lover was transformed into an officer of the Constabulary, and she was forced to climb into a carriage standing ready outside the garden and straightway driven off to Paris. La Chaussée had already been beheaded, and the Marquise suffered a similar fate; after the execution her body was burnt and the ashes were thrown to the winds.

The Parisians for a time breathed freely again, but it soon became evident that the evil Sainte Croix had passed on his dreadful art. Like a malicious and invisible spectre, death stole into even the closest circles of family, love, friendship, and seized upon its unhappy victims. He who today was in blossoming health on the morrow staggered ill and infirm, and no physician’s skill could save him. Riches, a lucrative office, a beautiful, perhaps too youthful wife: these sufficed for a man to be pursued to his death. Mistrust infected the most sacred relationships: husband feared his wife, father his son, sister her brother; meals remained untouched, wine undrunk; and where pleasure had once ruled, fearful eyes kept watch for a murderer. And still the most careful precaution was often in vain.

In an attempt to control the mounting disorder, the King appointed a tribunal to investigate and punish these crimes – the so-called Chambre ardente, which conducted its hearings not far from the Bastille and was presided over by La Regnie. Zealously though he went to work, La Regnie’s efforts remained fruitless, for a long time, and it fell to the cunning Desgrais to penetrate the source of the outrage. In the district of Saint Germain there lived an old woman named La Voisin, skilled in soothsaying and necromancy; and with the help of her accomplices, Le Sage and Le Vigoureux, she knew how to inspire fear and amazement even in those who thought themselves ungullible. Like Sainte Croix a pupil of Exili’s, she knew how to prepare Exili’s untraceable poison and so help sons to early inheritances and wives to younger husbands. Desgrais unearthed her secret and she confessed all: the Chambre ardente sentenced her to death by burning on the Place de Grève. Among her goods there was found a list of all those who had availed themselves of her assistance, and after that execution followed upon execution. Persons in high places did not elude suspicion: it was believed that Cardinal Bonzy had acquired from La Voisin the means of disposing of all those to whom, as Archbishop of Narbonne, he would have had to pay pensions; the Duchess de Bouillon and the Countess de Soissons, whose names were found on the list, were accused of connections with the diabolical old woman. Even the Duke of Luxembourg, Marshal of the Realm, was not spared; the Chambre ardente prosecuted even him and he surrendered to imprisonment in the Bastille, where La Regnie had him locked in a six-foot cell; months passed before it became clear that the Duke had committed no crime: he had once had his horoscope cast by Le Sage.

The blindness of his enthusiasm led La Regnie into illegalities and brutalities, and his tribunal assumed the character of an Inquisition: the slightest suspicion sufficed for strict incarceration, and often it was left to chance to prove the innocence of the condemned. La Regnie soon inspired the hatred of those whose avenger or protector he was supposed to be: the Duchess de Bouillon, questioned by him as to whether she had seen the devil, replied: ‘I fancy I see him at this moment!’

The blood of the guilty and the innocent flowed at the Place de Grève, and as a result death by poison at length grew more and more rare; but trouble of another sort now appeared, to spread fresh consternation. A gang of thieves appeared to have set themselves the task of acquiring all the jewellery in Paris, and they were not hesitating to commit murder in pursuit of this aim. Those fortunate enough to escape with their life deposed that a blow from a fist had knocked them down and that when they came round they found they had been robbed and were in a place quite different from where they had received the blow. The bodies discovered almost every morning in the streets or within houses all bore the same death wound: a dagger thrust to the heart which, according to the doctors, must have killed so quickly and surely that the victim, incapable of making a sound, must have dropped to the ground at once. In the voluptuous court of Louis XIV there were many who, entangled in some amorous intrigue, crept to their mistress in the night, often bearing a rich gift; but often, too, the lover failed to reach the house where he anticipated enjoyment; sometimes he fell on the threshold, sometimes even before his mistress’s door, who, horror-stricken, found his body in the morning.

In vain did Argenson, the Minister for Public Order, arrest anyone who seemed in the least suspicious; in vain did La Regnie rage and seek to extort confessions; watches and patrols were strengthened in vain – the villains were never detected. Only the precaution of arming yourself to the teeth, and having a lantern carried before you, was of any avail at all; even so, there were cases of servants being distracted and masters being murdered and robbed at the same instant.

What was very peculiar was that, despite investigation and inquiries in every place where jewels could in any way be disposed of, not the slightest trace of the stolen gems ever came to light.

Desgrais was enraged that the villains knew how to elude even his cunning: the quarter of the city in which he happened to be remained quiet, while the murderous thief was stalking his victim in another.

He resorted to theatricals, creating several versions of himself all so similar in walk, stance, speech, figure and facial expression that even the constables did not know who the real Desgrais was. Meanwhile, at the risk of his life, he eavesdropped alone in secret hide-aways, and at a distance followed this person or that who on his instructions was carrying jewellery; but such a person was never attacked; the thieves knew of this trick, too. Desgrais fell into despair.

One morning he went to La Regnie, pale, with face distorted, and quite beside himself.

‘What have you got? What’s the news?’ the president asked him.

‘Ah, Sir,’ Desgrais began, stammering with rage. ‘Last night, not far from the Louvre, the Marquis de la Fare was attacked in my presence.’

‘Heaven and earth!’ cried La Regnie jubilantly. ‘We have them!’

‘Just listen!’ Desgrais interrupted with a bitter laugh. ‘Listen first of all to how things turned out. I was standing outside the Louvre, all Hell pent up inside me, waiting for the devils who are making me a laughing stock. Then there came along, walking uncertainly, constantly looking behind him, a figure who went past me, close by but without seeing me. In the moonlight I recognized the Marquis de la Fare. I was not surprised to see him there, for I knew where he was going. Hardly had he gone a dozen steps past me when a figure sprang up as if out of the ground, threw him down and pounced upon him. Momentarily amazed that the murderer should thus have been delivered into my hands, I cried out and made to leap from my hiding place. But I got entangled in my cloak and fell over. I saw the man make off as if on the wings of the wind. I pulled myself together, ran after him, gave a blast on my horn; from the distance the constables’ whistles answered – everything came alive: the clatter of weapons, hoof-beats from all directions. “To me, to me–Desgrais, Desgrais!” I shouted, so that it echoed down the street. I can still see the man in front of me running in the bright moonlight; he tried to evade me, he turned off, and we came to the Rue Nicaise. As his efforts seemed to be weakening I endeavoured to redouble mine – at the most he was only fifteen paces ahead.’

‘You overtook him, you seized him, the constables came up!’ cried La Regnie with flashing eyes. He gripped Desgrais by the arm as if he were the fleeing murderer.

‘Fifteen paces,’ Desgrais continued in a dull voice, ‘fifteen paces in front of me the man leaped sideways into the shadows and disappeared through the wall.’

‘Disappeared? Through the wall! Are you raving?’ cried La Regnie, taking a step back and throwing up his hands.

‘Call me mad,’ Desgrais continued, rubbing his forehead. ‘Call me raving mad for ever more, a foolish ghostseer, but it is exactly as I am telling you. I was standing before the wall as several constables came running up. The Marquis de la Fare was with them, a drawn sword in his hand. We lit the torches. We groped about the wall: there was no sign of a door, or window, or any other opening. It was a solid, stone-built courtyard wall attached to a house. The people who live there are beyond suspicion. I have had everything inspected again today. It is the Devil himself we are dealing with.’

Desgrais’s adventure was soon common knowledge throughout Paris. Heads were full of stories of sorcery, the evocation of spirits, of the Devil’s alliance with Voisin, Vigoureux and the notorious Le Sage; and, as it lies in our nature to prefer the supernatural and miraculous to sober reason, very soon no one believed anything less than that, as Desgrais had said merely in a moment of ill-humour, the Devil himself was protecting the villains who had sold him their souls. Desgrais’s story became wildly embellished and, illustrated with a woodcut depicting the Devil sinking into the ground in front of the startled Desgrais, was printed and sold at every street corner; it was sufficient to drain the constables of courage, and they now roamed the streets quaking and quailing, festooned with amulets and drenched in holy water.

Argenson saw the efforts of the Chambre ardente foundering, and approached the King, asking him to create a new court with still wider powers; but the King, convinced he had already given the Chambre ardente too much power and shocked by the innumerable executions demanded by La Regnie, rejected the proposal altogether. A further effort was made to persuade him: in Madame de Maintenon’s chambers, where the King was accustomed to spend his afternoons and, indeed, even work with his ministers until late into the night, a poem was submitted to him on behalf of all the imperilled lovers, who complained that, as gallantry required them to bear an expensive gift to their beloved, they stood in peril of their life on each occasion; honourable and desirable though it might be to spill one’s blood for one’s beloved in chivalrous combat, it was quite otherwise with the treacherous attacks of a murderer, against whom no one could arm himself; and Louis, the star of all love and gallantry, who could rend the dark night with his bright rays and unveil the black secret which lurked therein, the godly knight who smote down his enemy, would even now flash his victorious, blazing sword and, like Hercules with the Lernaean Hydra, like Theseus with the Minotaur, do battle with the menacing evil which destroyed all pleasure in love and darkened all joy in sorrow, in wretched grief. The poem conveyed how the lover, creeping on his secret way to his beloved, was filled with such fear and distress that his anxiety killed all joy in love, every beautiful adventure in gallantry. And as it ended in grandiloquent praise for Louis XIV, the King could not fail to read it with satisfaction. He turned briskly to Madame Maintenon without taking his eyes from the paper, read the poem again aloud and then asked, smiling, what she thought of the desires of the imperilled lovers. Madame Maintenon, true to her serious nature and, as always, with a certain show of piety, replied that secret, forbidden paths did not merit special protection, but that the dreadful criminals did merit special measures for their extermination. The King, unhappy with such an indecisive answer, folded the paper and was about to rejoin his Secretary of State, who was at work in another room, when his eyes happened to light on Mademoiselle Scudery, who was present and had just taken her seat in a small armchair close to Madame Maintenon. He stepped over to her; his smile, which had vanished, now reappeared and, standing before the lady and again unfolding the poem, he said mildly: ’The Marquise wishes to know nothing of the gallantries of our enamoured gentlemen and is avoiding my question. But you, Mademoiselle, what do you think of this poetic petition?’

Mademoiselle de Scudery rose respectfully from her chair, a fleeting blush like the glow of evening passed over the pale cheeks of the worthy old lady, and, curtseying low, she said with downcast eyes:

The King, amazed at the chivalrous spirit of these words, which annihilated the whole poem and its tedious tirade, cried with flashing eyes: ‘By Saint Denis, you are right, Mademoiselle! No measure which strikes the innocent with the guilty shall shelter cowardice: let Argenson and La Regnie do their duty!’

All the horror of the times was depicted by Martinière in the vividest of colours when, the next morning, she related to her mistress what had happened the previous night and, with much quaking, handed over to her the mysterious casket. Both she and Baptiste – who, standing in a corner as white as a sheet and twisting his nightcap in his hands with anxiety, could scarcely utter a word – begged Mademoiselle in the most pathetic way for heaven’s sake to open the box only with the utmost caution.

Mademoiselle Scudery, weighing the locked secret in her hand and examining it, said with a smile: ‘You look like a couple of ghosts! That I am not rich, that I have no treasures worth murdering for, is as well known to those evil assassins – who, as you yourself said, spy into the innermost corners – as it is to you and me. Can they be after my life? Who can be interested in the death of a person of seventy-three who has pursued scoundrels and disturbers of the peace only in novels she herself has written, who writes mediocre verses incapable of arousing envy, who will leave nothing behind but the wardrobe of an old maid who occasionally went to Court and a couple of dozen books with gilded edges! And you, Martinière, you can make the stranger sound as terrifying as you like, yet I cannot believe he had any evil intent in mind.’

Martinière started back three paces, Baptiste sank almost to his knees with a dull ‘Ah!’, as their mistress pressed a protruding knob and the lid of the box sprang noisily open.

How astonished Mademoiselle was as in the box there sparkled up at her a pair of golden bracelets, richly set with jewels, and an identical necklace. She took out the jewellery, and as she praised the beautiful workmanship of the necklace, Martinière stared at the expensive bracelets and cried over and over again that even the conceited Montespan did not possess such finery.

‘But what is it supposed to be, what does it mean?’ said Mademoiselle Scudery. At that moment she saw a folded note in the bottom of the box; but hardly had she read what it contained than the note fell from her trembling hand, she threw a glance up to heaven, and sank back into the armchair. Terrified, Martinière and Baptiste ran to her side.

‘Oh!’ she cried, in a voice half-choked with tears. ‘Oh, the insult! Oh! the deep humiliation! Must this happen to me at my age? Have I behaved in a silly frivolous way, like a young, witless thing? Oh God, must words uttered half in jest bear such dreadful significance? I, who have been true to virtue and piety, irreproachable since childhood, must I then face such an accusation?’

Mademoiselle held her handkerchief to her eyes and sobbed violently, so that Martinière and Baptiste, utterly bewildered, did not know how to help their dear mistress in her distress.

Martinière picked up the note from the floor, and read what was written:

Your penetrating wit, most esteemed lady, has saved us from great persecution – us, who exercise the right of the strong on the weak and cowardly, and appropriate to ourselves riches which would otherwise have been shamefully squandered. As proof of our gratitude, kindly accept these jewels. They are the most expensive we have procured for some time, although you, dear lady, should be adorned with much finer jewellery than this. We beg you not to withdraw from us your friendship and your gracious remembrance. We Who Are Invisible.

‘Is it possible,’ cried Mademoiselle Scudery, when she had recovered to some extent, ‘is it possible that impudence and wicked mockery can be carried so far?’

Tales of Hoffmann

INTRODUCTION

MADEMOISELLE DE SCUDERY

A tale from the age of Louis XIV