An Historical Mystery | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] Dagny,
[email protected] and Bonnie Sala

AN HISTORICAL MYSTERY (The Gondreville Mystery)
by HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Monsieur de Margone.
In grateful remembrance, from his guest at the Chateau de Sache.
De Balzac.

AN HISTORICAL MYSTERY



CHAPTER I

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PART I



CHAPTER I
JUDAS
The autumn of the year 1803 was one of the finest in the early part of
that period of the present century which we now call "Empire." Rain
had refreshed the earth during the month of October, so that the trees
were still green and leafy in November. The French people were
beginning to put faith in a secret understanding between the skies and
Bonaparte, then declared Consul for life,--a belief in which that man
owes part of his prestige; strange to say, on the day the sun failed him,
in 1812, his luck ceased!
About four in the afternoon on the fifteenth of November, 1803, the sun
was casting what looked like scarlet dust upon the venerable tops of
four rows of elms in a long baronial avenue, and sparkling on the sand
and grassy places of an immense /rond-point/, such as we often see in
the country where land is cheap enough to be sacrificed to ornament.
The air was so pure, the atmosphere so tempered that a family was
sitting out of doors as if it were summer. A man dressed in a
hunting-jacket of green drilling with green buttons, and breeches of the
same stuff, and wearing shoes with thin soles and gaiters to the knee,
was cleaning a gun with the minute care a skilful huntsman gives to the
work in his leisure hours. This man had neither game nor game- bag,
nor any of the accoutrements which denote either departure for a hunt
or the return from it; and two women sitting near were looking at him

as though beset by a terror they could ill-conceal. Any one observing
the scene taking place in this leafy nook would have shuddered, as the
old mother-in-law and the wife of the man we speak of were now
shuddering. A huntsman does not take such minute precautions with his
weapon to kill small game, neither does he use, in the department of the
Aube, a heavy rifled carbine.
"Shall you kill a roe-buck, Michu?" said his handsome young wife,
trying to assume a laughing air.
Before replying, Michu looked at his dog, which had been lying in the
sun, its paws stretched out and its nose on its paws, in the charming
attitude of a trained hunter. The animal had just raised its head and was
snuffing the air, first down the avenue nearly a mile long which
stretched before them, and then up the cross road where it entered the
/rond-point/ to the left.
"No," answered Michu, "but a brute I do not