a trifle of agitation might easily have been excused in any prospective caretaker confronted for the first time by the chateau of mirabel. since there was, on this side of it, no half-concealing avenue, nor, indeed, trees of any kind whatever, but only the prone skeletons of what had been a series of formal gardens, the whole towering extent of the fa?ade broke in one oppressive moment upon eye and brain. and that, no doubt, was why mme vidal, walking at first with fair speed towards it over the wide gravel approach, suddenly came to a standstill, and, gripping tightly the handle of her basket, stood like a statue, gazing, across its forlorn parterres, at the overpowering bulk of her new home.
forty-two years had gone to the making of mirabel. begun in 1528 for fran?ois i., at the same time as that other palace of fontainebleau, it had risen under the eyes of successive royal architects, de l’orme and primaticcio, till it became the great chateau reckoned, in that day of the french renaissance, so wonderful a novelty—a residence not built round courtyards one or many, but constructed in a solid mass, a parallelogram of great length and height, whereof the north side exactly reproduced the south and the east the west. and girolamo della robbia, brought from italy, had ornamented it in every part with details of many-coloured majolica.
so it stood, this great pile, before the eyes of mme vidal—its five-storeyed fa?ade cut, as it were, into three portions by the two square-faced towers which ran up it, and which were repeated, something larger and more aspiring, at the corners. along both of the two lower storeys, making a sort of colonnade or loggia in front of the tall windows, went richly decorated arcading, fifteen bays of it, lofty and round-arched. interrupted by similar towers at intervals the colonnading ran, in fact, round the entire building. but the five bays of the central portion were more deeply recessed than the others, for at their pillar bases stretched, from tower to tower, twelve immensely long, wide and shallow steps. save for the absence of these steps and of the great entrance door to which they led—and for a difference, also, in the frieze over the arches—the second storey exactly reproduced the first. but the third and fourth gained a measure of variety from the absence of the colonnading; though on the third there was still an uncovered terrace or balcony. here too the windows, no longer so lofty, showed differing schemes of ornamentation, the frames of the lower row being supported by a sort of winged design, the upper accompanied by flat columns.
yet, despite these devices to break monotony, it was with relief that the eye, travelling upwards over this regular assemblage of colonnades and windows, came at last to the high-pitched roofs, with their agreeably different levels, their dormer windows, and their tall, ornate chimney-stacks. the roof of the midmost portion of the chateau, between the two central towers, was the lowest; yet even this, after putting forth two great decorated chimneys, suddenly soared up at each end into a peak higher even than those of the towers. and on either hand of it sprang the great pointed pavilion-roofs of the side wings, much higher again, and blossoming, they also, into the most intricately ornamented chimneys and dormer windows.
and everywhere there was this astounding many-hued, glazed and highly-modelled decoration, lavished in frieze and medallion from the richly diapered soffits of the arcading on the ground floor to the very crests of the roofs themselves. it was true that it did not glitter so brightly in the sun of 1799 as in that of 1570, that more than two centuries of exposure to northern weather had dimmed—not perhaps to its disadvantage—something of the italian’s lustre and colouring, and that the far more destructive human agencies of the last seven years had obliterated some of his ornaments altogether, yet mirabel still was a “palais de fa?ence,” still supported the enthusiastic testimony of a renaissance contemporary that its mass was “fort éclattante à la veue.” and even if the decoration were too exuberant, even if the whole building were imposing rather from sheer size than from any other architectural virtue, it was undeniably a great house, with a majesty and a history of its own, a house that bore out the proud motto of its vanished owners, memini et permaneo—‘i remember and i remain.’
such was the chateau of mirabel, built for the first king of the valois-angouléme branch, whose salamander still in places adorned it, and given by the last to his favourite, césar de saint-chamans, marquis de trélan. up and down those great steps, in the last two hundred years, had gone many a prince and warrior and statesman and courtier, many a great lady and fair. mirabel with its colonnades and majolica had known much revelry, much wit, much evil; some good deeds, no little patronage of art and letters, now and then a liberal charity; once or twice, in brides of the line, some approach to saintliness. and it had sheltered always a brilliant courage, a brilliant egoism, an astoundingly tenacious self-will, and a pride as great as the rohans’. for these last qualities it had been no unfit setting.
now it was . . . as it was; and a poor semptress from paris, whom the warrant of that little hunchbacked, cross-grained angevin attorney, the director larevellière-lépeaux, had appointed its only tenant, stood in front of the blind, shuttered mass and gazed at it. the sun might strike on the majolica, but how eyeless looked those great lofty windows of the lower storeys, through that empty colonnading where no one ever now walked or talked! the glass was gone from some of them. everything was dead, ruined, deserted—a pulseless body. only, over the level central roof, against the clear sky of afternoon, voyaged with light heart a feather of an april cloud, and the april breeze shook cheerfully the few self-sown flowers that flaunted haphazard in what was the mere chart of the formal gardens. but mme vidal’s eyes were on the house, and the house only.
presently a lively discussion of sparrows took place near her on the gravel. the angry cheeping appeared to rouse her, and she began to go on again towards the chateau, while the victor of the affray, hopping to the basin of a sunken fountain, drank delicately of that water with which the spring rains, and they alone, had filled it.
very soon the new concierge was close enough to the house to distinguish plainly the winged beasts, like dragon-headed horses, that went in couples, face to face, all along the frieze running above the colonnading of the ground floor, and the medallions of classical heads that filled the spandrils below the frieze, and the doric entablature of the next storey. walking now like an automaton, she came nearer and nearer, and stood at last at the foot of the great steps, and, looking up, saw, over the blotched and discoloured marble, through which the grass was pushing triumphant fingers, how the great door, visible now through the richly diapered archway, was roughly mended and yet more roughly boarded up. it still wore the scars of that august day seven years ago when, for the first time in all its proud history, it had been opened to a will that was neither its master’s nor the king’s. at it, too, the concierge stood a moment or two gazing, then, as she had been directed, she turned to her left hand, and began to descend the steps which led from the ground level at the foot of the tower towards the basement offices. these steps, at the base of either tower, were invisible till one was close to the house, since they were screened by a line of stone balustrading, but, as the sentry had said, a board with a legend and a downward-pointing hand directed the feet of the visitor to this subterranean entrance. mirabel had been greatly admired once for the possession of this very thing.
just as mme vidal got to the bottom of the steps the door at right angles to them opened, and revealed the outgoing caretaker, a dry, thin-lipped woman dressed in rusty black, with a fairhaired child of three or four clinging to her skirts.
“i hope, madame,” said her successor apologetically, “that i have not inconvenienced you? i fear i am a little late; the diligence was not punctual.”
“you’re not later than i expected,” replied mme prévost unemotionally. “i saw thibault chattering to you at the gate; i know what he is, so i don’t blame you. from the way his tongue goes, it’s a pity he’s not a woman.”
without more ado she led the way in, the child’s hand in hers, and mme vidal followed her along a short passage into a smallish living-room, clean, bare, and distinctly stuffy with an accumulated rather than a recent smell of cooking. facing the door, high up, were two tall windows, which came just down to the level of the ground outside, itself, naturally, higher than that of the floor. they gave sufficient light, but it was not very easy to see out of them, for they were heavily barred. in the middle of the room, covered with a nightmare of a cloth, stood a round table. on the left hand was the stove, with a few shelves and appurtenances; on the right a press, two chairs and another door.
“here is the bedroom,” said mme prévost, opening this door, and affording a hasty glimpse of a still smaller room, where the chief object to be seen was a short, wide, wooden bed, covered with a patchwork quilt of various shades, and situated in a recess.
“you’ll find these rooms quite comfortable,” said the woman. “the government provides all necessaries, down to pots and pans, as i expect you’ve been told, so you’ll have what you want for cooking. and i will come again in the morning to show you round the chateau; i can tell you your duties then. i have left you enough provisions for your supper and breakfast, in case you did not think to bring anything with you. there is a small trunk of yours arrived, however; i put it in the bedroom. i suppose you know that people come to see the place occasionally, though a good portion of it is shut up? there’s keys—a mort of keys. look, madame!” she unfastened a small door in the wall, and showed them reposing in a sort of cupboard.
“it will take me time to learn all those,” said mme vidal, resting her hand on the table. she had a look, suddenly come upon her, of great fatigue.
“oh, they are all labelled,” returned mme prévost complacently. “well, i’ll come and show you in the morning, about nine. yes, ma petite”—for the child was tugging at her skirts—“we are going to see papa. she hardly knows what the word means; born in germinal of the year iv, she was, and he away in germany with general moreau. . . . i hope you will find everything you want, madame. i can assure you it’s all clean and as it should be.”
“i am sure it is,” answered mme vidal. “but may i not pay you this evening for the provisions you have been kind enough to leave me?”
“very well, madame, if you wish,” replied the other, who was gathering together some small possessions. “there’s the bread and the coffee, and a couple of eggs—not so easy to come by in these hard days. the milk-woman comes at half-past six in the morning.” reflecting a moment she named a sum, and mme vidal, pulling out a shabby purse, paid it with reiterated thanks.
“but i see that you have left me some wood too,” she added. “do i not owe you for that also?”
“no, no,” said mme prévost, waving away the proposal. “there’s never any lack of wood here, and the government lets the concierge have it free. it would be hard indeed if they were stingy with it, considering that it costs them nothing, as it is all off the estate. this lot is particularly good, you’ll find; it comes from the pine avenue, i fancy.”
mme vidal took a step backwards. “they are not cutting down the pine avenue, surely?” she exclaimed in a sharp, sudden voice.
a great astonishment dawned in the meagre visage before her. “why, do you know mirabel already!” she asked. “i thought—the citizen deputy said you came from the provinces.”
“so i did—so i do,” stammered the new concierge. “but even in the provinces . . . one had heard of the pine avenue at mirabel. my late husband had seen it in his youth.”
“i see,” said mme prévost slowly. “well, i will leave you to settle in, madame, for you look tired. i’ll come in the morning about nine then. the stairway up to the ground floor is a little to the left out there; not that you will need to go up before i come. the key of the door i let you in at is in the lock; everybody, visitors and all, comes by that door, and you are not responsible for any other; in fact the rest are nearly all barred up. you had better lock that door behind me now. come along, mariette.”
almost in silence mme vidal went with her into the passage, and when mme prévost and the child had passed through, and she had responded with a pale smile to the outgoing concierge’s “a demain, madame!” she turned the key and pushed the bolt. then she went back to the living-room, and locked that door behind her also.
back in mirabel! back in mirabel! was it possible? back in mirabel—though, to be sure, in a region of it that she had never even seen before. some of the swarm of servants had lived here in old times. had she betrayed herself about the avenue? how foolish, after all these years of self-repression! she looked slowly round. yes, this odd couple of rooms was no doubt some lesser steward’s in the past. but, if unfamiliar, it was at least situated within the shell of what had been, what still was, mirabel—mirabel the loved, mirabel the hated, mirabel the enchanted palace, mirabel the purgatory. . . .
she went suddenly to the cupboard in the wall, and putting in her hand drew out the keys. yes, she was once more, in a sense—but in what a sense—the chatelaine of mirabel.
and, flinging them back clashing into their seclusion, she sat down at the table, buried her face in her hands and began to laugh. there was never a laugh more mirthless, yet the situation had its humours. at her, indeed, the “watchdogs” on the disfigured gateposts, as the sentry had termed them, would never even have growled. the new concierge of mirabel’s fallen estate had once been the mistress of mirabel’s magnificence, for mme vidal the caretaker was valentine de saint-chamans, was the duchesse de trélan in person.
