New Bodies for Old

by Maurice Renard

At that moment I could not check a movement of vexation; the head-lamps had just gone out after an agonized throb. For a second the darkness was total, and at the same time there was such a profound silence that I could well believe I had suddenly become blind and deaf.

Then my eyes gradually became unsealed, and soon the crescent moon appeared, shedding its snowy light on the cold night. The forest became lit up with a frozen whiteness. I shivered. In my aunt’s lifetime it would have been with terror; I should have beheld in the darkness, where the vapors were creeping, dragons wallowing and serpents gliding. An owl flew off. I should have considered that bird the winged helm of a paladin—an enchanted paladin. The birch tree, standing straight up, shone with a lance-like gleam. An oak tree—a son perhaps of the magic tree which was the husband of the Princess Leélina—quivered. It was huge and druidical—a bunch of mistletoe hung on its main branch, and the moon cut through it with a shining sacred sickle.

Assuredly the nocturnal landscape was like an hallucination. For want of something better to do, I meditated on it. Without understanding why as well as I do to-day, I used to experience all its suggestiveness, and at nightfall I only ventured out unwillingly. Fonval itself was, I think, in spite of its countless flowers and its beautiful winding alleys, a most forbidding place. Its pointed windows, its hundred years old park inhabited by statues, the stagnant water of its pond, the precipice which closed it in, the Hell-like entrance, all these things made that ancient abbey (transformed into a château) peculiar even in daylight, and one would not have been surprised to learn that everybody there talked in fables. That would have been his real language.

That at any rate was how I talked, and still more how I acted, during my holidays. These were for me a long fairy tale in which I played with imaginary or artificial personages, living in the water, in the trees, and under the earth oftener than upon it. If I passed the lawn galloping with my bare legs, my air clearly showed the squadrons of knights were, in my fancy, charging behind me. And the old boat I masted for the occasion with three broomsticks, on which bellied nondescript sails, served me as a galleon, and the pond became the Mediterranean bearing the fleet of the Crusaders. Lost in thought and looking at the water-lily islands and the grass peninsulas, I proclaimed: “Here are Corsica and Sardinia!... Italy is in sight.... We are sailing round Malta....” At the end of a minute I cried “Land!” We were landing in Palestine—“Montjoye and St. Denis!”—I suffered on that boat sea-sickness and home-sickness; the Holy War intoxicated me;—I learnt in it two things—enthusiasm and geography....

But often the other characters were represented. That made it more real. I remembered then—for every child has a Don Quixote in him—I remembered a giant Briareus who was the summerhouse, and especially a barrel which became the dragon of Andromeda. Oh, that barrel! I had made a head for it with the help of a squinting pumpkin, and vampire wings with two umbrellas. Having ambushed my contraption at the bend of an alley, leaning it up against a terra-cotta nymph, I set out in search of it more valiant than the real Perseus, and, armed with a pole, I went caracoling on an invisible hippogriff. But when I discovered it, the pumpkin leered at me so strangely that Perseus almost took flight, and the umbrellas owed it to his emotion that they were broken to pieces in the yellow blood of the facetious vegetable.

My puppets did indeed make an impression on me by reason of the rôle I assigned them. As I always reserved for myself that of protagonist, hero, conqueror, I easily surmounted that terror during the day, but at night, though the hero became little Nicolas Vermont, an urchin, the barrel remained a dragon. Cowering under the sheets, my mind excited by the story which my aunt had just finished, I knew the garden was peopled with my terrifying fancies, and that Briareus was mounting guard there all the time, and that the dreadful barrel, resuscitated, hiding its claws with its wings, watched my window from afar.

At that age I despaired of ever being, later on in life, like other people, and able to face the dark. And yet my fears did vanish, leaving me impressionable no doubt, but not a coward; and it was indeed I who found myself without dismay lost in the lonely wood—all too empty, alas, of fairies and enchanters.

I had just reached this point in my reverie, when a sort of vague noise arose in the Fonval direction; an ox’s lowing, and something like a dog’s long mournful howl. That was all—and then the sleeping calm returned.

Some minutes elapsed, and next I heard an owl hoot somewhere between myself and the château; another raised its voice not so far away as the first; and then others took flight from places nearer and nearer me, as if the passage of some creature were scaring them.

And indeed a light sound of steps like the trot of some four-footed animal, made itself heard and drew nearer on the roadway. I listened for some time to the beast moving to and fro in the labyrinth, losing itself like me perhaps, and then suddenly it appeared before me.