The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment

by James Branch Cabell

HEN Florian awakened he was lying upon the ground, with the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault serving for Florian’s pillow, in the gardens of Storisende, just by the little tree raised from the slip which his great-uncle, the Admiral, had brought from the other side of the world. Nobody knew the right name of this tree: it was called simply the tree from the East. Caterpillars had invaded it that autumn, and had eaten every leaf from the boughs, and then had gone away: but after their going the little tree had optimistically put forth again, in the mild October weather, so that the end of each bare branch was now tipped with a small futile budding of green.

It was upon the bench beneath this tree that Florian’s father was sitting. Monsieur de Puysange had laid aside his plumed three-cornered hat, and as he sat there, all a subdued magnificence of dark blue and gold, he was looking down smilingly at the young lazibones whom the Duke’s foot was gently prodding into wakefulness. The Duke was wearing blue stockings with gold clocks, as Florian was to remember....

Not until manhood did Florian appreciate his father, and come properly to admire the exactness with which the third Duke of Puysange had kept touch with his times. Under the Sun King’s first mistress Gaston de Puysange had cultivated sentiment, under the second, warfare, and under the third, religion: he had thus stayed always in the sunshine. It was Florian’s lot to know his father only during the last period, so the boy’s youth as spent dividedly at the Duke’s two châteaux, at Storisende and at Bellegarde, lacked for no edifying influence. The long summer days at Storisende were diversified with all appropriate religious instruction. In winter the atmosphere of Versailles itself—where the long day of Louis Quatorze seemed now to be ending in a twilight of stately serenity through which the old King went deathward, handsomely sustained by his consciousness of a well-spent life and by the reverent homage of all his bastards,—was not more pious than was that of Bellegarde.

Let none suppose that Monsieur de Puysange affected superhuman austerities. Rather, he exercised tact. If he did not keep all fast-days, he never failed to secure the proper dispensations, nor to see that his dependants fasted scrupulously: and if he sometimes, even now, was drawn into argument, Monsieur de Puysange was not ever known after any lethal duel to omit the ordering of a mass, at the local Church of Holy Hoprig, for his adversary’s soul. “There are amenities,” he would declare, “imperative among well-bred Christians.”

Then too, when left a widower at the birth of his second legitimate son, the Duke did not so far yield to the temptings of the flesh as to take another wife; for he confessed to scruples if marriage, which the Scriptures assert to be unknown in heaven, could anywhere be a quite laudable estate: but he saw to it that his boys were tended by a succession of good-looking and amiable governesses. His priests also were kept sleek, and his confessor unshocked, by the Duke’s tireless generosity to the Church; and were all of unquestioned piety, which they did not carry to excess. In fine, with youth and sentiment, and the discomforts of warfare also, put well behind him, the good gentleman had elected to live discreetly, among reputable but sympathetic companions....

When Florian told his father now about Florian’s delightful adventure in Acaire, the Duke smiled: and he said that, in this dream begotten by Florian’s late reading of the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault, Florian had been peculiarly privileged.

“For Madame Mélusine is not often encountered nowadays, my son. She was once well known in this part of Poictesme. But it was a long while ago she quarreled with her father, the wise King Helmas, and imprisoned him with all his court in the high place that ought not to be. Yet Mélusine, let me tell you, was properly punished for her unfilial conduct; since upon every Sunday after that, her legs were turned to fishes’ tails, and they stayed thus until Monday. This put the poor lady to great inconvenience: and when she eventually married, it led to a rather famous misunderstanding with her husband. And so he died unhappily; but she did not die, because she was of the Léshy, born of a people who are not immortal but are more than human—”

“Of course I know she did not die, monsieur my father. Why, it was only this afternoon I talked with her. I liked her very much. But she is not so pretty as Melior.”

It seemed to Florian that the dark curls of his father’s superb peruke now framed a smiling which was almost sad. “Perhaps there will never be in your eyes anybody so pretty as Melior. I am sure that you have dreamed all this, jumbling together in your dreaming old Monsieur Perrault’s fine story of the sleeping princess—La Belle au Bois Dormant,—with our far older legends of Poictesme—”