CHAPTER IX

Prologue of the _Vampire_--The style offends my neighbour's ear--First act--Idealogy--The rotifer--What the animal is--Its conformation, its life, its death and its resurrection

The overture was intended to represent a storm. The scene opened in the cave of Staffa. Malvina slept on a tomb. Oscar sat on another. A third enclosed Lord Ruthven, who was to come out of it at a given moment. The part of Malvina was taken by Madame Dorval; Oscar, or the angel of marriage, by Moessard; Lord Ruthven, or the Vampire, by Philippe.

Alas! who could have known at that moment, when I was looking eagerly beyond the curtain, taking in the whole scene, decorations and characters combined, that I should be present at Philippe's funeral, watch by Madame Dorval's death-bed, and see Moessard crowned?

In the prologue, there was another angel, called Ithuriel, the angel of the moon, talking with the angel of marriage. This was Mademoiselle Denotte. I do not know whether she is now living or dead.... The narrative was carried on between the angel of marriage and the angel of the moon, two angels who, as they wore the same armour, might have been taken to belong to the same family.

Malvina had lost herself in hunting; the storm terrifying her, she had taken shelter in the cave of Staffa. There, unable to keep awake, she had fallen asleep on a tomb. The angel of marriage was watching over her. The angel of the moon, who had slid down on a ray of the pale goddess, through the cracks of the basaltic roof, asked why the angel of marriage sat there, and, above all, how it came about that there was a young girl in the grotto of Staffa.

The angel of marriage replied that, as Malvina, sister of Lord Aubrey, was to espouse Lord Marsden next day, he had been summoned by the importance of the occasion, and that his looks, when Ithuriel interrupted him in the act of silently gazing upon the beautiful betrothed girl, and the sadness depicted upon his face, sprang from knowledge of the misfortunes in store for the young maiden, who was about to fall from the arms of Love into those of Death. Then Ithuriel began to understand.

"Explain thyself," said Ithuriel, "is it true that horrible phantoms _come (viennent)_ sometimes ...?"

My neighbour trembled, as though an asp had bitten him in his sleep.

"_Vinssent!_" he cried,--"_vinssent!_3"

Cries of "Silence!" burst forth all over the theatre, and I too clamoured loudly for silence, for I was enthralled by this opening.

The angel of the moon, interrupted in the middle of her sentence, threw an angry look across the orchestra, and went on:

"Is it true that horrible phantoms come _(viennent)_ under the cloak of the rights of marriage, to suck blood from the throat of a timid maiden?"

"_Vinssent! vinssent! vinssent!_" murmured my neighbour.

Fresh cries of "_Hush!_" drowned his exclamation, which it must be confessed was less bold and less startling this time than the first.

Oscar replied: "Yes! and these monsters are called vampires. A Power whose inscrutable decrees we are not permitted to call in question, has permitted certain miserable beings, who are tormented by the punishments which their crimes have drawn down upon them on this earth, to enjoy a frightful power, which they exercise by preference over the nuptial couch and over the cradle; sometimes their formidable shapes appear clothed in the hideous guise death has bestowed upon them; others, more highly favoured, because their career is more brief and their future more fearful, obtain permission to reclothe themselves with the fleshy vesture lost in the tomb, and reappear before the living in the bodily shapes they formerly possessed."

"And when do these monsters appear?" asked Ithuriel.

"The first hour of the morning wakes them in their sepulchre," replied Oscar. "When the sound of its sonorous stroke has died away among the echoes of the mountains, they fall back motionless in their everlasting tombs. But there is one among them over whom my power is more limited ... what am I saying?... Fate herself can never go back on her decisions! ... After having carried desolation into twenty different countries, always conquered, ever continuing, the blood which sustains its horrible existence ever renewing its vitality ... in thirty-six hours, at one o'clock in the morning, it has at length to submit to annihilation, the lawful punishment of an infinite succession of crimes, if it cannot, at that time, add yet another crime, and count one more victim."

"My God! think of writing a play like that!" murmured my neighbour.

It seemed to me that he was too critical; for I thought this dialogue was couched in the finest style imaginable. The prologue continued. Several persons who had heard my neighbour gave vent to various whispered comments on the presumption of this indefatigable interrupter; but, as he buried himself in his _Pastissier françois,_ the murmurs ceased.

It is unnecessary to point out that the young betrothed asleep on the tomb was the innocent heroine who was destined to be the bride of the Vampire, and had the public been in any doubt, all their doubts would have been dispersed after the last scene of the prologue.

"What do I hear?" said Ithuriel; "thy conversation has kept me long while in these caves."

As the angel of the moon asks this question, the silvery chime of a distant clock is heard striking one, and the reverberation is repeated in echoes again and again.

_Oscar._ "Stay and see."

All the tombs open as the hour sounds; pale shades rise half out of their graves and then fall back under their monumental stones as the sound of the echoes dies away.

A SPECTRE, clad in a shroud, escapes from the most conspicuous of these tombs: his face is exposed; he glides to the place where Miss Aubrey sleeps, exclaiming--

"Malvina!"

_Oscar._ "Withdraw."

_Spectre._ "She belongs to me!"

Oscar puts his arms round the sleeping girl. "She belongs to God, and thou wilt soon belong to the regions of nothingness."

The Spectre retires, but repeats threateningly, "To nothingness."

Ithuriel crosses the stage in a cloud.

The scene changes and represents an apartment in the house of Sir Aubrey.

"Absurd! absurd!" exclaimed my neighbour. And he resumed his reading of _le Pastissier françois._

I did not at all agree with him: I thought the staging magnificent; I had nothing to say about Malvina, for she had not spoken; but Philippe seemed to me exceedingly fine, notwithstanding his paleness, and Moessard very good. Moreover, crude as it was, it was an attempt at Romanticism--a movement almost entirely unknown at that time. This intervention of immaterial and superior beings in human destiny had a fanciful side to it which pleased my imagination, and maybe that evening was responsible for the germ in me from which sprang the _Don Juan de Marana_ of eleven years later. The play began.

_Sir_ Aubrey (the reader will see presently why I underline the word _Sir)--Sir_ Aubrey met Lord Ruthven, a rich English traveller, at Athens, and they became friends. During their wanderings about the Parthenon and their day-dreams by the seashore, they planned means for tying the bonds of their friendship more firmly, and, subject to Malvina's consent, they decided upon a union between the young girl, who was at home in the castle of Staffa, and the noble traveller, who had become her brother's closest friend. Unfortunately, during an excursion which Aubrey and Ruthven made to the suburbs of Athens, to attend the wedding of a young maiden endowed privately by Lord Ruthven, the two companions were attacked by brigands: a sharp defence put the assassins to flight; but Lord Ruthven was struck down mortally wounded. His last words were a request that his friend would place him on a hillock bathed by the moon's rays. Aubrey carried out this last request, and laid the dying man on the place indicated; then, as his friend's eyes closed and his breathing ceased, Aubrey began to search for his scattered servitors; but when he returned with them, an hour later, the body had disappeared. Aubrey fancied that the assassins must have taken the body away to remove all traces of their crime.

When he returned to Scotland, he broke the news of Lord Ruthven's death to his brother, Lord Marsden, and told him of the close relationship that had united them during their travels. Then Marsden claimed succession to his brother's rights, and proposed to marry Malvina, if Malvina would consent to this substitution. Malvina, who did not know either the one or the other, made no objection to Lord Marsden's claim or to her brother's wishes.

Lord Marsden is announced. Malvina feels that slight embarrassment which, like an early morning mist, always comes over the hearts of young maidens at the approach of their betrothed. Aubrey, overjoyed, rushes to greet him; but when he sees him he utters a cry of surprise. It is not Lord Marsden--that is to say, a person hitherto unknown--who stands before him; it is his friend Lord Ruthven!

Aubrey's astonishment is intense; but all is explained. Ruthven did not die; he only fainted: the coolness of the night air brought him back to consciousness. Aubrey's departure and his return to Scotland had been too prompt for Ruthven to send him word; but when he was well he returned to Ireland, to find his brother dead; he inherited his name and his fortune, and, under that name, with twice the fortune he had before, he offered to espouse Malvina, and rejoiced in anticipation at the joy he would cause his beloved Aubrey, by his reappearance before him. Ruthven is charming: his friend has not overrated him. He and Malvina were both so favourably impressed with one another that, under the pretext of very urgent business, he asked to be allowed to marry her within twenty-four hours. Malvina makes a proper show of resistance before yielding. They return to Marsden's castle. The curtain falls.

Now I had been watching my neighbour almost as much as the play, and, to my great satisfaction, I had seen him close his Elzevir and listen to the final scenes. When the curtain fell, he uttered an exclamation of disdain accompanied by a deep-drawn sigh.

"Pooh!" he said.

I took advantage of this moment to renew our conversation.

"Excuse me, monsieur," I said, "but at the conclusion of the prologue you said,'How absurd!'"

"Yes," said my neighbour, "I suppose I did say so; or, if I did not say it, I certainly thought it."

"Do you then condemn the use of supernatural beings in the drama?"

"Not at all; on the contrary, I admire it extremely. All the great masters have made potent use of it: Shakespeare in _Hamlet_, in _Macbeth_ and in _Julius Cæsar_; Molière in _le Festin de pierre_, which he ought rather to have called _le Convive de pierre_, for his title to be really significant; Voltaire in _Sémiramis_; Goethe in _Faust._ No, on the contrary, I highly approve of the use of the supernatural, because I believe in it."

"What! you have faith in the supernatural?"

"Most certainly."

"In everyday life?"

"Certainly. We elbow every moment against beings who are unknown to us because they are invisible to us: the air, fire, the earth, are all inhabited. Sylphs, gnomes, water-sprites, hobgoblins, bogies, angels, demons, fly, float, crawl and leap around us. What are those shooting stars of the night, meteors which astronomers in vain try to explain to us, and of which they can discover neither cause nor end, if they are not angels carrying God's orders from one world to another? Some day we shall see it all."

"Did you say, we shall see?"

"Yes, by heaven! we shall see. Do you not think that we see these miracles?"

"You said 'we'; do you think we personally shall see them?"

"Well, I did not exactly say that ... not I, for I am already old; perhaps you, who are still young; but certainly our descendants."

"And why, for heaven's sake, will our descendants see anything that we cannot see?"

"In the same way that we see things which our ancestors never did."

"What things do we see which they did not?"

"Why, steam, piston guns, air-balloons, electricity, printing, gunpowder! Do you suppose the world progresses only to stop half-way? Do you imagine that after having conquered successively the earth, water and fire, man, for instance, will not make himself master of the air? It would be ridiculous to hold that belief. If perchance you doubt it, young man, so much the worse for you."

"I confess one thing, monsieur, and that is, I neither doubt nor believe. My mind has never dwelt on such theories. I have been wrong, I see, since they can be interesting, and I should take to them if I had the pleasure of talking for long with you. So you believe, monsieur, that we shall gradually attain to a knowledge of all Nature's secrets?"

"I am convinced of it."

"But we should then be as powerful as the Almighty."

"Not quite.... As knowing, perhaps; as powerful, no."

"Do you think, then, that there is such a great distinction between knowledge and power?"

"There is an abyss between those two words! God has given you authority to make use of all created things. None of these things is useless or idle: all at the right moment are capable of contributing to the well-being of man, to the happiness of humanity; but, in order to be able to apply these things to the good of the race and to the welfare of the individual, man must know precisely the cause and the end of everything. He will utilise all, and when he has utilised the earth, water, fire and air, neither space nor distance will any longer exist for him: he will see the world as it is, not merely in its visible forms, but also in its invisible forms; he will penetrate into the bowels of the earth, as do gnomes; he will inhabit water, like nymphs and tritons; he will play in fire, as do hobgoblins and salamanders; he will fly through the air, like angels and sylphs; he will ascend, almost to God, by the chain of being and by the ladder of perfection; he will see the supreme Ruler of all things, as I see you; and if, instead of learning humility through knowledge, he should gain pride; if, instead of worshipping, he be puffed up; if because of his knowledge of creation, he thinks himself equal to the Creator, God will say to him, 'Make Me a star or a _rotifer_!'"

I thought I had not heard him correctly, and I repeated--

"A star or a...?"

"Or a rotifer:--it is an animal I have discovered. Columbus discovered a world and I an ephemera. Do you imagine that Columbus weighed heavier, for all that, before the eyes of God, than I?"

I remained in thought for a moment. Was this man out of his mind? Whether or no, his madness was a fine frenzy.

"Well," he went on, "one day people will discover water-sprites, gnomes, sylphs, nymphs, angels, just as I discovered my animalcule. All that is needed is to find a microscope capable of perceiving the infinitely transparent, just as we have discovered one for the infinitely little. Before the invention of the solar microscope, creation, to man's eyes, stopped short at the acarus, the seison; he little thought there were snakes in his water, crocodiles in his vinegar, blue dolphins ... in other things. The solar microscope was invented and he saw them all."

I sat dumbfounded. I had never heard anyone speak of such extraordinary things. "Good gracious! monsieur," I said to him, "you open out to me a whole world of whose existence I knew nothing. What! are there serpents in water?"

"Hydras."

"Crocodiles in our vinegar?"

"Ichthyosauri."

"And blue dolphins in ...? But it is impossible!"

"Ah! that is the usual formula--'It is impossible!' ... You said just now,'It is impossible!' in reference to things we do not see. And now you say 'It is impossible' of things that everybody else but yourself has seen. All 'impossibility' is relative: what is impossible to the oyster is not impossible to the fish; what is impossible to the fish is not impossible to the serpent; what is impossible to the serpent is not impossible to the quadruped; what is impossible to the quadruped is not impossible to man; what is impossible to man is not impossible with God. When Fulton offered to demonstrate the existence of steam to Napoleon, Napoleon said, as you, 'It is impossible!' and had he lived two or three years longer he would have seen pass by, from the top of his rocky island, their funnels smoking, the machines that might still have kept him emperor, had he not scorned them as the creatures of a dream, utopian and impossible! Even Job prophesied steamships...."

"Job prophesied steamships?"

"Yes, most certainly.... What else do you think his description of leviathan meant, whom he calls the king of the seas?--'I will not forget the leviathan, his strength and the marvellous structure of his body. By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. His breath kindleth coals: his heart is as firm as a stone, yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. He maketh the deep to boil as a pot; he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him: one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.' Leviathan is, of course, the modern steamship!"

"Indeed, monsieur," I said to my neighbour, "you make my head reel. You know so much and you talk so well, I feel carried away by all you tell me, like a leaf by a whirlwind. You spoke of a tiny animal that you discovered--an ephemera: do you call that a rotifer?"

"Yes."

"Did you discover it in water, in wine or in vinegar?"

"In wet sand."

"How did it come about?"

"Oh! why, in a very simple way. I had begun making microscopic experiments upon infinitely small things, long before Raspail. One day, when I had examined under the microscope water, wine, vinegar, cheese, bread, all the ingredients in fact that experiments are usually made upon, I took a little wet sand out of my rain gutter,--I then lodged on a sixth floor,--I put it on the slide of my microscope and applied my eye to the lens. Then I saw a strange animal move about, in shape like a velocipede, furnished with two wheels, which it moved very rapidly. If it had a river to cross, these wheels served the same purpose as those of a steamboat; had it dry land to go over, the wheels acted the same as those of a tilbury. I watched it, I studied its every detail, I drew it. Then I suddenly remembered that my rotifer,--I had christened it by that name, although I have since called it a _tarentatello_>--I suddenly remembered that my rotifer had made me forget an engagement. I was in a great hurry; I had an appointment with one of the animalculæ which do not like being kept waiting--an ephemera whom mortals call a woman.... I left my microscope, my rotifer and the pinch of sand which was his world. I had other work to do where I went, protracted and engaging work, which kept me all the night. I did not get back until the next morning: I went straight to my microscope. Alas! the sand had dried up during the night, and my poor rotifer, which needed moisture, no doubt, to live, had died. Its almost imperceptible body was stretched on its left side, its wheels were motionless, the steamboat puffed no longer, the velocipede had stopped."

"Ah! poor rotifer!" I exclaimed.

"Wait, wait!"

"Ah! was it like Lord Ruthven, then? He was not dead? Was he, like Lord Ruthven, a vampire?"

"You will see! Quite dead though he was, the animal was still a curious variety of ephemera, and his body was as worth preserving as that of a mammoth or a mastodon. Only, you understand, quite other precautions have to be taken to handle an animal a hundred times smaller than a seison, than to change the situation of an animal ten times greater than an elephant! I selected a little cardboard box, from among all my boxes; I destined it to be my rotifer's tomb, and by the help of the feather end of a pen I transported my pinch of sand from the slide of my microscope to my box. I meant to show this corpse to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire or to Cuvier; but I did not get the opportunity. I never met these gentlemen, or, if I did meet them, they declined to mount my six flights of stairs; so for three or maybe six months or a year I forgot the body of the poor rotifer. One day, by chance, the box fell into my hand; and I desired to see what change a year had wrought on the body of an ephemera. The weather was cloudy, there had been a great fall of stormy rain. In order to see better, I placed my microscope close to the window, and I emptied the contents of the little box on to the slide. The body of the poor rotifer still lay motionless on the sand; but the weather, which remembers the colossal so ruthlessly, seemed to have forgotten the tiny atom. I was looking at my ephemera with an easily understood feeling of curiosity, when suddenly the wind drove a drop of rain on to the microscope slide and wet my pinch of sand."

"Well?" I asked.

"Well, then the miracle took place. My rotifer seemed to revive at the touch of that refreshing coolness: it began to move one antenna, then another; then one of its wheels began to turn round, then both its wheels: it regained its centre of gravity, its movements became regular; in short, it lived!"

"Nonsense!"

"Monsieur, the miracle of the resurrection, in which perhaps you believe, although Voltaire had no faith in it, was accomplished, not at the end of three days ... three days, a fine miracle!... but at the end of a year.... I renewed the same test ten times: ten times the sand dried, ten times the rotifer died! ten times the sand was wetted, and ten times the rotifer came to life again! I had discovered an immortal, not a rotifer, monsieur! My rotifer had probably lived before the Deluge and would survive to the Judgment Day."

"And you still possess this marvellous animal?"

"Ah, monsieur," my neighbour replied, with a deep sigh, "I have not that happiness. One day when, for the twentieth time, perhaps, I was preparing to repeat my experiment, a puff of wind carried away the dry sand, and, with the dry sand, my deathless phenomenon. Alas! I have taken many a pinch of wet sand from my gutters since, and even from elsewhere, but always in vain; I have never found again the equivalent of what I lost. My rotifer was not only immortal but even unique.... Will you allow me to pass, monsieur? The second act is about to begin, and I think this melodrama so poor that I much prefer to go away."

"Oh, monsieur," I said, "I beg of you not to go; I have many more things to ask of you, and you seem to me to be very learned!... You need not listen if you don't want to; you can read _le Pastissier françois,_ and in the intervals we can talk of Elzevirs and rotifers.... I will listen to the play, which, I assure you, interests me greatly."

"You are very good," said my neighbour; and he bowed.

Then came the three raps and, with the charming suavity I had already noticed in him, he resumed his reading.

The curtain rose, revealing the entrance to a farm, a chain of snowy mountains, and a window. The farm represented on the stage was that belonging to Marsden Castle.