Mr. d’Andercausse’s Candle

by Henri de Régnier

translated by Michael Wooff

He died last night. He’d been sick for several days. He was wandering, with feet of lead and tottering, through the vast rooms and passages inside the chateau. Yesterday I found him sitting on one of the steps on the stairs, holding his head in his hands. When I went past, he lifted up his sombre, vicious face with its tense features and it was already ashen. He seemed to be in pain. I did not dare question him.

Oh, don’t be surprised. No more than I, his own wife, no more than all those who live locally, would anyone have been bold enough to put a question to the dreaded Mr. d’Andercausse. Everyone knew only too well his terrible moods and his fractious character. Nothing changed in him as he got older. He was always the same. He was feared and avoided and, in the solitude that had grown up around us, he had, within a radius of several miles, become legendary.

You haven’t been in this area long enough, Father, otherwise you’d already have heard people talk about this Mr. d’Andercausse who’s lived in seclusion for thirty years in this chateau lost in woods and heathland, in this chateau so derelict that, as one of the rooms that we occupy in it becomes uninhabitable, we leave it to retire to another until that one, too, has to be surrendered in its turn to the bats and the owls.

How many stories they might have told you about this unsociable neighbour, hard on peasant farmers, harsh to people in the village, intractable to those in town, about this frowning, wicked chatelain, about this friendless, solitary, brutal, taciturn man who was only at home in the midst of decay and the ruins into which he let his chateau fall. It’s as if he took perverted pleasure in seeing it destroyed from one day to the next, with holes in its roofs, crumbling masonry, dried-up dovecotes, uncultivated gardens where he could give free rein to his savage idleness and to that mania that, each night when he went to bed, prompted him to put out his candle with a pistol shot rather than just blow it out. Mr. d’Andercausse’s candle is famous, Father. People laugh about it but, oh, if they only knew! But you need to know yourself, Father, since he’s dead and the sinister, horrible farce he daily acted out is over.

He died last night. You’re going to see him. There he is, in his bed. Even death hasn’t altered the viciousness of his face. You’d recognize him even now if you’d known him. But you haven’t been two minutes in your present presbytery! You’ll see. His hands are clasped and his eyes are shut. On his bedside table there’s a candle burning that he won’t put out! He’s dead and I’ll no longer hear the sinister discharge of his weapon that has woken me up each night for the last twenty years, unless, in anguish and in desperation, I was waiting for it to happen.

You’ll ask me perhaps why, for so many years, I put up with that life, why I married Mr. d’Andercausse in the first place? Oh dear! I was young then. I was an orphan. I was poor. He came to me and it seemed to me that he loved me. He spoke to me of a chateau where we would live together, of a noble and carefree existence, of children. I submitted and followed him.

And, apart from that, Mr. d’Andercausse was not then what he later became. I felt him to be violent and have plenty of rough edges, of course, but why should I not have hoped to tame his savage nature? Oh, I soon knew where I stood with him! Mr. d’Andercausse could never be anything but who he was. The long game I had thought to play was lost. I think, as games go, I played it well. My lips never uttered a word of reproach to him, and I bore with his bullying uncomplainingly. I reached the age of thirty in this way and then the awful tragedy occurred.

I was quite taken aback when my husband announced to me one day the arrival in Andercausse of one of his cousins, Jean de Callègue. He had invited him to spend the summer with us. As soon as I saw him, I felt for him a sneaking sympathy. Jean de Callègue was as gentle and polite as my husband was brutal and violent. He was a tall young man, studious and prone to melancholy. He loved books. Everything about him revealed a soul that was delicate and charming and he showed me marks of respect that I could not help but be cognisant of, given I was simply not used to them. Had he taken pity on my loneliness and inner distress? Did he feel for me an undeclared attraction? I don’t know. He never treated me with anything other than impeccable respect anyway.

The reciprocity of our affection and tastes went no further than ourselves. Sometimes he looked at me with a degree of emotional tenderness when certain facts revealed to him the moral misery of my existence. The most intensely jealous person could not have found anything to arouse suspicion in the way we were with each other. Nevertheless, more than once, I surprised my husband looking daggers at us. I should have warned Jean de Callègue, but fate overrules our intentions and we can do nothing about it.

It was a Thursday in October when the terrible thing took place. It was fine and sunny. Jean de Callègue was reading when Mr. d’Andercausse came to suggest that they go to the chestnut tree grove to shoot magpies. Mr. de Callègue closed his book and followed Mr. d’Andercausse.

They had scarcely been gone a few minutes when a rifle shot rang out. Suddenly, I had a premonition that something bad had happened. I left the living room and ran towards the grove of chestnut trees. My legs were shaking and, as I ran, I said to myself over and over again out loud the words: ‘I love you, I love you, Jean! Jean! Jean!’ and it seemed to me that my heart was bursting both with happiness and fright.

Then a great shout was expelled from my lungs. Jean de Callègue was lying on the grass, his head all but blown off. Near him, his feet in a pool of blood, Mr. d’Andercausse was standing with a rifle in his hand, impassive and sombre. He did not say a word but watched me throw myself on Jean de Callègue’s body.

Any first aid would have served no useful purpose. Mr. de Callègue had sustained the full charge of what was in the rifle, set off by clumsiness on his part as Mr. d’Andercausse explained to the doctor who came, a few hours later, to record the death. These accidents with firearms are all too common, Father, aren’t they? Only, what is far less common is loading a rifle with bullets to bring down magpies. Nevertheless, no-one seemed to take any notice of this peculiar circumstance.

Jean de Callègue was buried in the village cemetery. He had no close relatives. His name was never mentioned again. My husband never made any allusion to this incident but, from year to year, he grew more taciturn and more brutal, crueller and more fearsome, harder towards everyone and harder towards me. From year to year the isolation became more complete around our crumbling chateau that, one room at a time, we left to be abandoned and to fall in ruins.

That is how I’ve lived for twenty years, side by side with the murderer of Jean de Callègue, waiting each night for the moment when Mr. d’Andercausse put out his candle with a shot from his pistol as if he had wanted to remind me in this way, every night, of his pointless crime and to arouse my recollection of it in the depths of my silent sorrow.

And so I’ve stayed here, I’ve stayed here so as never to leave that grave, at which I have never been able to kneel down or lay a flower or say a prayer. I’ve stayed here to love and to hate, to wait for the day of my deliverance, the day when I would finally see, at the end of that loathsome bed where slept the assassin of my heart and of my life, the funerary candle burn that he would not be able to extinguish and the light from which would let me gaze on, one last time, a face I’ve come to hate.

* * *

Having finished his narrative, Father Dumont opened his snuff box and added:

“Such, my young friend, were the words that Mrs. d’Andercausse spoke to me when I first came to this parish. You can see that I had strong souls and characters to contend with, and I could tell you plenty of other stories, too, if your friendship could extend to availing yourself of my humble hospitality a while longer. I’ll take you tomorrow to see what’s left of the chateau. Time has almost done with it now since the death of Mrs. d’Andercausse. Her grave is in the cemetery next to that of Mr. de Callègue.

“And now let’s go and sleep. Here’s your candle to go upstairs with, and don’t blow it out as Mr. d’Andercausse did his. Round here, they say it of someone who always has to be different. But suffice it to say that the good people locally know less about it than their parish priest does.”

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