The snow man

by George Sand

These spiders’ webs are everywhere else too. They hang all over the smoked frames of the large family portraits that fill three sides of the room, and in the corners they are festooned with a sort of regularity, as if some austere and industrious fate had assumed the form of a spider, and undertaken to furnish hangings for these deserted wainscots, complete enough to cover even the least crevice.

But of the spiders themselves you will not find one. The cold has made them torpid, or killed them; and if you should be obliged—as I hope you will not—to pass a night in this melancholy room, you would not have even these industrious little creatures to keep you company. The clock, whose tick-tack is not unlike the regular ticking of some insects, is mute as they. Its hands have stood still upon the dial at four o’clock in the morning, for God knows how many years.

I say four o’clock in the morning, for the reason that in the country where we now are, the striking part of old timepieces indicates whether the hours are those of the night or of the day—for there the days are sometimes only five hours long, and the nights nineteen. If you were fatigued with your journey and should sleep late, you might not know, when you awoke, whether it was the next morning after your arrival, or the next morning but one. If the clock were going it would tell you, but it is not, and it is impossible to tell whether it could be made to go.

Well; what country is it? We shall learn without having to go outside the room. Along the whole length of the irregular wall, by which the staircase is built, and which, like the three other sides, is more than half covered with oaken wainscot, large maps are hung; very likely because their shape rendered it a convenient place. They are longer horizontally than their height, and accordingly just cover that part of the wall above the wood-work. They seem to be banished here rather than exhibited, and we shall have to go up the twelve steps of the staircase ending in the wall, to convince ourselves that these long bands of parchment, colored in the hardest tints, are maps, charts, and plans of strong cities.

The staircase leads us precisely to the height of that one of these maps representing the country, which was undoubtedly placed just there for convenience of consultation; and also, perhaps, to hide the place where a door has been built up.

This great green serpent in the middle of the picture is the Baltic Sea. I presume that you recognize it from its resemblance to a dolphin with a double tail, and from the innumerable indentations of its fiords—narrow and winding gulfs that run far into the rocky coast.

Don’t get lost on the side of Finland, which is there painted in yellow ochre; look on the other shore for about the middle of Sweden (painted red), and you will recognize, from its lakes, from its rivers and mountains, the province of Dalecarlia, a region which was still comparatively uncivilized at the time to which this story refers. It is in the last century, towards the close of the kindly but troubled reign of Adolphus-Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, at one time the Protestant Bishop of Lubeck, but who afterwards married Ulrica of Prussia, the friend of Voltaire, the sister of Frederick the Great; in a word, as far as we can judge, it is about the year 1770.

Rather later, we shall see the aspect of this country. You must be satisfied at present, dear reader, to know that you are in a small, old chateau, perched on a rock, in the very centre of a frozen lake, which will naturally lead you to conclude that I have carried you there in midwinter.

And now a last glance at this room while it is still ours; for, gloomy and cold as it is, we shall soon have competitors for the use of it. It is furnished with old chairs of wood, quite artistically carved, but massive and inconvenient. One arm-chair, comparatively modern—that is of the time of Louis XVI.—is covered with silk that has become yellowed and stained, but it is still soft, and of a convenient shape for sleeping; it looks out of place in the solemn company of the other worm-eaten chairs, with their high backs, which, for more than twenty years, have not been moved from the wall. To conclude, an old bed, with four twisted columns and curtains of tattered silk, stands in the corner opposite the staircase, and adds, by its dilapidated appearance, to the gloomy and sinister aspect of the place.

But we must retire, reader. The door opens, and you must depend upon me hereafter if you wish to know about the past and future events whose theatre I have thus shown you.