Thus, for two years past, Cornélius lived alone with his sister, who was believed to be a witch. A tailor who lived hard by declared that he had often seen her at night waiting on the roof to fly off to her Sabbath. This statement was all the more extraordinary because the old miser shut his sister up in a room of which the windows were barred with iron.
Cornélius in his old age, fearing more and more that men should rob him, had conceived a hatred for all the world excepting the King, whom he esteemed highly. He had sunk into deep misanthropy; but, in his passion for gold, the assimilation of the metal with his very substance had become more and more complete, and, as is commonly the case with misers, his avarice increased with age. He was suspicious even of his sister, though she was perhaps more avaricious and thrifty than himself, and outdid him in sordid inventiveness. There was something mysterious and questionable in their way of life. The old woman so rarely took bread from the baker, and was so seldom seen at market, that the least credulous observers had at last attributed to these strange beings the knowledge of some occult means of sustaining life. Some, who meddled in alchemy, said that Maître Cornélius could make gold. The learned declared that he had discovered the universal panacea. And to most of the country folk, when the townspeople spoke of him, he was a chimerical creature, so that they would come out of curiosity to stare at his house.
The young gentleman, sitting on a bench by the house facing that of Maître Cornélius, looked at the Malemaison and the Hôtel de Poitiers by turns. The moon shed high lights on the salient parts, lending color by the contrast of light and shade on the sculpture in relief. The play of this capricious pale light gave a somewhat sinister expression to both houses. Nature seemed to lend herself to the superstitious notions that hung about the place.
The gentleman recalled all the many traditions which made Cornélius an object at once of curiosity and dread. Though the vehemence of his passion confirmed him in his determination to get into the house and to stay there as long as might be necessary to carry out his projects, he hesitated before taking this final step, though well aware that he should do so. But who, in the critical hours of life, does not love to listen to presentiments and play see-saw, as it were, over the abyss of futurity? As a lover worthy of his love, the youth feared lest he should perish before the Countess' love should grace his life.
This secret hesitancy was so painfully absorbing that he did not feel the cold wind that blew round his legs and against the projecting masses of the houses. If he entered the goldsmith's service, he must renounce his name, as he had already doffed his handsome garb as a nobleman. In the event of disaster, he could make no appeal to the privileges of his birth or the protection of his friends but at the cost of destroying the Comtesse de Saint-Vallier beyond all rescue. If the old lord suspected her of having a lover, he was capable of roasting her in an iron cage by a slow fire, of torturing her to death day by day in the depths of some dungeon.
As he looked down on the wretched clothes in which he was disguised, the gentleman was ashamed of his own appearance. To behold his black leather belt, his clumsy shoes, his wrinkled hose, his frieze breeches, and his gray cloth jerkin, he might be the follower of some mean sergeant of the law. To a nobleman of the fifteenth century it was as bad as death to play the part of pauper townsman and renounce the privileges of his rank. Still, to climb the roof of the mansion where his mistress sat weeping; to creep down the chimney or run along the parapet, crawling from gutter to gutter till he reached her window; to risk his life, if only he might sit by her side on a silken cushion, in front of a good fire, during the slumbers of that sinister husband, whose snore would enhance their rapture; to defy heaven and earth; to exchange the most audacious embrace; to speak words which would inevitably be punished by death, or at least by a bloody struggle,—all these enchanting visions, with the romantic perils of the adventure brought him to a decision. The smaller the prize of his endeavor,—were it only to be that he should once more kiss his lady's hand,—the more determined was he to dare everything, prompted by the chivalrous and impassioned spirit of the time. Then he did not really suppose that the Countess would dare to refuse him the sweetest reward of love, in the midst of such mortal dangers. The adventure was too perilous, too impossible, not to be carried through to the end.
At this juncture every bell in the town rang the curfew. The law had fallen into disuse, but in the provinces the hour was still tolled, for customs die slowly in the country. Though the lights were not put out, the captains of the watch stretched chains across the streets. Many doors were bolted and barred; the steps of a few belated citizens were heard in the distance as they made their way, surrounded by their followers, armed to the teeth and carrying lanterns; and then, ere long, the town, gagged as it were, seemed to fall asleep, fearing no attack from malefactors, unless by way of the roof.
And at that time the house-tops were a recognized highway during the night. The streets were so narrow in country towns, and even in Paris, that robbers could jump from one side to the other. This dangerous game was a constant amusement to King Charles IX. in his youth, if we may believe the memoirs of the time.
Fearing to be too late in presenting himself to Maître Cornélius, the young gentleman was on the point of rising to knock at the door of the House of Evil, when, on looking at it, his attention was riveted by a sort of vision, such as the writers of the day would have called diabolical. He rubbed his eyes as if to clear them, and a thousand different emotions flashed through his brain. On each side of the door he beheld a face framed between the bars of a sort of loophole. At first he supposed these faces to be grotesque masks carved in stone, so wrinkled were they, so angular, twisted, exaggerated, and motionless; they were tanned,—that is to say, brown; but the cold and the moonlight enabled him to detect the slight white cloud of thin breath coming out of the two blue noses, and at last he could make out in each haggard face, under shaggy eyebrows, a pair of china-blue eyes that sparkled with a pale light, like those of a wolf crouching in a thicket when he hears the hounds in full cry. The uneasy gleam of those eyes rested so fixedly on him, that, after meeting it during the moment when he was studying these singular objects, he felt like a bird put up by a sporting dog; a fevered spasm clutched at his heart, but was at once controlled. These two faces were beyond a doubt those of Cornélius and his sister.