You were challenging me, were you not, and you set me that condition because it was one which I could not fulfill? Nevertheless, I promised, and I should like to keep my promise. What I have tried to do, in order to place life before you in a more, favorable light, would seem purposeless if your confidence feels the lack of this talisman to which you attach so great a value. We must not laugh at these little superstitions. They are often the mainspring of our best actions.
Dear friend, if you had helped me, I should have achieved yet one more victory. Alone and hard pushed by the proximity of the date, I have failed, not however without placing things on such a fooling that the undertaking, if you care to follow it up, has the greatest chance of success.
And you will follow it up, won’t you? We have entered into a mutual agreement which we are bound to honor. It behooves us, within a fixed time, to inscribe in the book of our common life eight good stories, to which we shall have brought energy, logic, perseverance, some subtlety, and occasionally a little heroism. This is the eighth of them. It is for you to act so that it may be written in its proper place on the fifth of December, before the clock strikes eight in the evening.
And on that day you will act as I shall now tell you.
First of all — and above all, my dear, do not complain that my instructions are fancifuclass="underline" each of them is an indispensable condition of success — first of all, cut in your cousin’s garden three slender lengths of rush. Plait them together and bind up the two ends so as to make a rude switch, like a child’s whiplash.
When you get to Paris, buy a long necklace of jet beads cut into facets and shorten it so that it consists of seventy-five beads of almost equal size.
Under your winter cloak wear a blue woollen gown. On your head, a toque with red leaves on it. Round your neck, a feather boa. No gloves. No rings.
In the afternoon take a cab along the left bank of the river to the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. At four o’clock exactly there will be, near the holy-water basin just inside the church, an old woman dressed in black, saying her prayers on a silver rosary. She will offer you holy water. Give her your necklace. She will count the beads and hand it back to you. After this you will walk behind her, you will cross an arm of the Seine, and she will lead you down a lonely street in the Ile Saint-Louis to a house which you will enter by yourself.
On the ground floor of this house you will find a youngish man with a very pasty complexion. Take off your cloak and then say to him: “I have come to fetch my clasp.”
Do not be astonished by his agitation or dismay. Keep calm in his presence. If he questions you, if he wants to know your reason for applying to him or what impels you to make that request, give him no explanation. Your replies must be confined to these brief formulas: “I have come to fetch what belongs to me. I don’t know you, I don’t know your name, but I am obliged to come to you like this. I must have my clasp returned to me. I must.”
I honestly believe that, if you have the firmness not to swerve from that attitude, whatever farce the man may play you will be completely successful. But the contest must be a short one, and the issue will depend solely on your confidence in yourself and your certainty of success. It will be a sort of match in which you must defeat your opponent in the first round. If you remain impassive, you will win. If you show hesitation or uneasiness, you can do nothing against him. He will escape you and regain the upper hand after a first moment of distress, and the game will be lost in a few minutes. There is no midway house between victory or... defeat.
In the latter event, you would be obliged — I beg you to pardon me for saying so — again to accept my collaboration. I offer it to you in advance, my dear, and without any conditions, while stating quite plainly that all that I have been able to do for you and all that I may yet do gives me no other right than that of thanking you and devoting myself more than ever to the woman who represents my joy, my whole life.
Hortense, after reading the letter, folded it up and put it away at the back of a drawer, saying, in a resolute voice, “I sha’n’t go.”
To begin with, although she had formerly attached some slight importance to this trinket, which she had regarded as a mascot, she felt very little interest in it now that the period of her trials was apparently at an end. She could not forget that figure eight, which was the serial number of the next adventure. To launch herself upon it meant taking up the interrupted chain, going back to Rénine and giving him a pledge which, with his powers of suggestion, he would know how to turn to account.
Two days before the fifth of December she was still in the same frame of mind. So she was on the morning of the fourth, but suddenly, without even having to contend against preliminary subterfuges, she ran out into the garden, cut three lengths of rush, plaited them as she used to do in her childhood, and at twelve o’clock had herself driven to the station. She was uplifted by an eager curiosity. She was unable to resist all the amusing and novel sensations which the adventure proposed by Rénine promised her. It was really too tempting. The jet necklace, the toque with the autumn leaves, the old woman with the silver rosary — how could she resist their mysterious appeal, and how could she refuse this opportunity of showing Rénine what she was capable of doing?
And then, after all, she said to herself, laughing, he’s summoning me to Paris. Now, eight o’clock is dangerous to me at a spot three hundred miles from Paris in that old deserted Château de Halingre, but nowhere else. The only clock that can strike the threatening hour is down there, under lock and key, a prisoner!
She reached Paris that evening. On the morning of the fifth she went out and bought a jet necklace which she reduced to seventy-five beads, put on a blue gown and a toque with red leaves, and at four o’clock precisely entered the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont.
Her heart was throbbing violently. This time she was alone, and how acutely she now felt the strength of that support which, from unreflecting fear rather than any reasonable motive, she had thrust aside! She looked around her, almost hoping to see him. But there was no one there... no one except an old lady in black, standing beside the holy water basin.
Hortense went up to her. The old lady, who held a silver rosary in her hands, offered her holy water and then began to count the beads of the necklace which Hortense gave her.
She whispered, “Seventy-five. That’s right. Come.”
Without another word she toddled along under the light of the streetlamps, crossed the Pont des Tournelles to the Ile Saint-Louis, and went down an empty street leading to a crossroads, where she stopped in front of an old house with wrought-iron balconies.
“Go in,” she said.
And the old lady went away.
Hortense now saw a prosperous-looking shop which occupied almost the whole of the ground floor and whose windows, blazing with electric light, displayed a huddled array of old furniture and antiquities. She stood there for a few seconds gazing at it absently. A signboard bore the words THE MERCURY together with the name of the owner of the shop, “Pancaldi.” Higher up, on a projecting cornice which ran on a level with the first floor, a small niche sheltered a terra cotta Mercury poised on one foot, with wings to his sandals and the caduceus in his hand, who, as Hortense noted, was leaning a little too far forward in the ardor of his flight and ought logically to have lost his balance and taken a header into the street.