The first Sunday in June was drawing to a close. The shadow of the motor-car was fleeting on ahead of me and getting longer every moment.

Ever since the morning, people had been looking at me with anxious faces as I passed, just as one looks at a scene in a melodrama. With my leather helmet which gave me the look of a bald skull, my glasses like port-holes, or the eye-sockets of a skeleton, and my body clothed in tanned skin, I must have seemed to them some queer seal from the nether regions, or one of St. Anthony’s demons, fleeing from the sunlight towards the night, in order to enter therein.

And to tell the truth, I had almost a soul like that of one of the Lost; for such is the soul of a solitary traveler who has been for seven hours at a stretch on a racing-car. His spirit has something like a nightmare in it; in place of thought, an obsession is settled there. Mine was a little peremptory phrase—“Come alone, and give notice”—which, like a tenacious goblin, worried my lonely mind, overstrained as it was with joltings and speed.

And yet this strange injunction “come alone and give notice,” doubly underlined by my Uncle Lerne in his letter, had not at first struck me excessively. But now that I was obeying it—being alone and having given notice—and rolling along towards the Castle of Fonval, the inexplicable command insisted, so to speak, on displaying all its strangeness. My eyes began to see the fateful expression everywhere, and my ears made it sound in every noise in spite of my efforts to drive away the fixed idea. If I wanted to know the name of a village, the sign-post announced “Come alone”; “Give notice” followed in the wake of a bird’s flight, and the engine, unresting and exasperating, repeated thousands and thousands of times: “Come alone, come alone, come alone, give notice, give notice, give notice.” Then I began to ask myself the wherefore of this wish of my uncle, and not being able to find the reason, I ardently longed for the arrival which should solve the mystery, less curious in reality about the doubtless commonplace answer, than exasperated by so despotic a question.

Fortunately I was drawing near, and the country growing more and more familiar spoke so clearly of the old days, that the haunting question relaxed its insistence. The town of Nanthel, populous and busy, detained me, but on coming out of the suburbs I at last perceived, like a vague and very distant cloud, the heights of the Ardennes Mountains.

Evening draws on. Desiring to reach the goal before night I open out to the full. The car hums, and under it the road is engulfed in a whirl; it seems to enter the car to be rolled up in it, as the yards of ribbon roll themselves up on a reel. Speed makes its hurricane wind whistle in my ears; a swarm of mosquitoes riddle my face like small shot, and all sorts of little creatures patter on my goggles.

Now the sun is on my right; it is on the horizon; the acclivities and declivities of the road, raising me up and sinking me down very quickly, make the sun rise and set for me several times in succession. It disappears. I dash through the dusk as hard as my brave engine can go—and I fancy that the 234 XY has never been excelled. This makes the Ardennes about half an hour away. The cloudy offing is already putting on a green tinge, a forest color, and my heart has leapt within me. Fifteen years! I have not seen those dear great woods for fifteen years—they were my old holiday friends.

For it is there, it is in their shadow that the chÂteau hides in the depths of an enormous hollow.... I remember that hollow very distinctly and I can already distinguish its whereabouts—a dark stain indicates it. Indeed it is the most extraordinary ravine. My late aunt, Lidivine Lerne, who was fond of legends, would have it that Satan, furious at some disappointment, had scooped it out with a single blow of his gigantic hoof. This origin is disputed. In any case the metaphor gives a vivid picture of the place, an amphitheater with precipitous walls of rock, with no other outlet than a large defile opening on the fields. The plain in other words penetrates into the mountain like a gulf of the sea; it there forms a blind-alley, the perpendicular walls of which rise as it spreads, and whose end is rounded off in a wide sweep. The result is that one gets to Fonval without the least climb, although it is right in the bosom of the mountain. The park is the inner part of the circle, and the cliff serves as a natural wall, except in the direction of the defile. This latter is separated from the domain by a wall into which a gateway has been let. A long avenue leads up to it, straight, and lined with lime trees. In a few minutes I shall be in it ... and soon after I shall know why nobody must follow me to Fonval—“come alone and give notice”—why these orders?

Patience. The mass of the Ardennes cleaves itself into clumps. At the rate I am going, each clump seems in motion; gliding rapidly; the crests pass one behind the other, draw near or draw off, seem lower and then rise again with the majesty of waves, and the spectacle is incessantly varying like that of a titanic sea.

A turn in the road unmasks a hamlet, I know it well. In the old days, every year, in the month of August, it was before that station that my uncle’s carriage, with Biribi in the shafts, awaited my mother and me. We used to go there for the holidays. All hail Grey-l’Abbaye! Fonval is only three kilometers distant now. I could go there blindfold. Here is the road leading straight to the place, the road which will soon plunge into the woods and take the name of Avenue.

It is almost night. A peasant shouts something at me—insults probably. I’m accustomed to that. My hooter replies with its threatening and mournful cry.

The forest! Ah, what a potent perfume it has for me—the perfume of the old-time holidays! Can their memory bring any other odor than that of the forest? It is an exquisite odor.... I should like to prolong this festival of scent.

Slowing down, the car goes on gently. Its sound becomes a murmur. Right and left the cliff walls of the wide gully begin to rise. Were there more light, I should be coming into sight of Fonval at the end of the straight line of the avenue. Hullo! What’s up?...

I had almost upset; the road had unexpectedly made a bend.

I slackened off still more. A little further on another bend—then another....

I stopped.

The stars one by one were beginning to shed their luminous dew. In the light of the Spring evening I could see above me the high mountain-crests, and the direction of their slopes astonished me. I tried to back, and discovered a bifurcation which I had not noted in passing. When I had taken the road to the right, it offered me after several windings a new branching-off—like a riddle; and then I guided myself in the Fonval direction according to the lie of the cliffs that ran towards the chÂteau, but new cross-roads embarrassed me. What had become of the straight avenue?... The thing utterly puzzled me.

I switched on the head-lights. For a long time by the aid of their light I wandered among the criss-crossing of the alleys without being able to find my way, so many various offshoots joined the open places, and so balking were the blind-alleys. It seemed to me I had already passed a certain birch-tree. Moreover the cliff walls always remained at the same height; so that I was really turning in a maze and making no advance. Had the peasant of Grey tried to warn me? It seemed probable.

None the less, trusting to chance, and piqued by the contretemps, I went on with my exploration. Three times the same crossing showed in the field of light of my lamps, and three times I came on that same birch-tree by different roads.

I wanted to call for help. Unfortunately the hooter went wrong, and I had no horn. As for my voice, the distance which separated me from Grey on the one side and Fonval on the other would have prevented its being heard.

Then a fear assailed me ... if my petrol gave out!... I halted in the middle of a cross-road and tested the level. My tank was almost empty. What would be the good in exhausting it in vain evolutions! After all, it seemed to me an easy thing to reach the chÂteau on foot through the woods.... I tried it. But wire-fences hidden in the bushes blocked the way.

Assuredly this labyrinth was not a practical joke played at the entrance of a garden, but a defensive contrivance to protect the approaches of some retreat.

Much out of countenance, I began to reflect.

“Uncle Lerne, I don’t understand you at all,” thought I. “You received the notice of my arrival this morning, and here am I detained in the most abominable of landscape-gardens.... What fantastic idea made you contrive it? Have you changed more than I thought? You would hardly have dreamt of such fortifications fifteen years ago.”

... “Fifteen years ago, the night, no doubt, resembled this one. The heavens were alive with the same glitter, and already the toads were enlivening the silence with their clear short cries, so pure and sweet. A nightingale was warbling its trills as that one now is doing. Uncle, that evening of long ago was delicious too. And yet my aunt and my mother had just died, within eight days of one another, and the sisters having disappeared, we remained face to face, one a widower, and the other an orphan—you, uncle, and I.”

And the man of those far-off days stood before my mind’s eye as the town of Nanthel knew him then, the surgeon already celebrated at thirty-five for the skill of his hand and the success of his bold methods, and who in spite of his fame, remained faithful to his native town—Dr. FrÉdÉric Lerne, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the “Ecole de MÉdecine,” corresponding member of numerous learned societies, decorated with many divers orders, and—to omit nothing—guardian of his nephew, Nicolas Vermont.

This new father whom the Law assigned me I had not met often, for he took no holidays and only passed his summer Sundays at Fonval. And even these he spent in work—ceaseless and secret work. On those days his passion for horticulture, suppressed all the week, kept him shut up in the little hothouse with his tulips and his orchids.

And yet, in spite of the rarity of our meetings, I knew him well and loved him dearly.

He was a sturdy man, calm and sober, rather cold perhaps, but so kind. In my irreverent way I called his shaven face an “old wife’s face,” and my jesting was quite misplaced, for sometimes he would turn it into an antique visage, lofty and grave, and sometimes into one of delicate mockery (“Regency” style). Among our modern shavelings my uncle was of the few whose head and face by their nobility prove their legitimate descent from an ancestor draped in a toga, and a grandfather clothed in satin, and would allow their scion to wear the costumes of his ancestors without putting them to shame.

For the moment Lerne appeared to me decked out in a black overcoat rather badly cut, in which I had seen him for the last time—when I was setting out for Spain. Being a rich man, and wishing me to be one too, my uncle had sent me into the cork business as an employee of the firm Gomez & Co. of Badajoz.

And my exile had lasted fifteen years, during which the position of the Professor had certainly become better, to judge by the sensational operations he had performed, the fame of which had reached me in the depths of Estremadura.

As for me, my affairs had come to grief. At the end of fifteen years, despairing of ever selling safety-belts and cork on my own account, I had just returned to France to seek another trade, when Fate procured me that of an independent man. It was I who won the lucky number for a million francs, the donor of which wished to remain incognito.

In Paris I took comfortable rooms, but without luxury. My flat was convenient and unpretentious. I had the bare necessaries plus a motor-car and minus a family.

But before founding a new family, it seemed to me the right thing to renew relations with the old—that is to say with Lerne, and I wrote to him.

Not but what after our separation a regular correspondence had been established between us. At the beginning he had given me wise advice and had shown himself pleasantly paternal. His first letter indeed contained the announcement of a Will in my favor hidden in the secret drawer of a desk at Fonval.

After the rendering of his accounts as guardian our relations remained as before. Then, suddenly, his messages became different in character, and grew fewer and fewer, their tone becoming that of boredom, then of annoyance. The matter was commonplace, then vulgar, and the phrasing awkward; the very writing seemed to alter. Each time he wrote, these things became more marked, and I had to limit myself every 1st of January to sending my best wishes. My uncle replied with a few scribbled words.... Wounded in the only affection I possessed, I was much afflicted.

What had happened?

A year before this sudden change—five years before my return to Fonval and my wanderings in the labyrinth—I had read in the “Epoca”:

“We have received the news from Paris that Professor Lerne is saying good-by to his patients in order to devote himself to scientific research begun in the hospital of Nanthel. With this aim that excellent physician is retiring to the neighborhood of the town in the Ardennes, to his chÂteau of Fonval which has been arranged for that purpose. He is taking with him among others, Dr. Klotz of Mannheim and the three assistants of the Anatomisches Institut founded by this latter at 22, Friedrichstrasse, which has now closed its doors—when shall we have results?”

Lerne had confirmed this event to me in an enthusiastic letter, which, however, added nothing to the bald facts in the paragraph. And it was a year later on, I say again, that the change in his nature had taken place. Had twelve months of work ended in failure? Had some bitter disappointment so gravely affected the Professor that he should treat me like a stranger and almost as if I were a bore?...

In defiance of his hostility I wrote respectfully and with the utmost possible affection from Paris the letter in which I told him of my good fortune, and I asked his leave to pay him a visit.

Never was invitation less engaging than his. He asked me to give him warning of my arrival so that he might order a carriage to go and fetch me from the station. “You will doubtless not remain long at Fonval,” he added, “for Fonval is not a gay place. We are hard at work. Come alone and give notice.”

But, Heavens! I had given notice and I was alone!—I who had considered my visit as a duty! Well, well, that was merely a piece of stupidity on my part.

And I gazed in bad humor at the star of light on the roads where the exhausted head-lamps were casting no brighter an illumination than a night-light.

Without doubt I was going to pass the night in that sylvan jail; nothing would get me out of it before day. The toads of the pool in the Fonval direction called me in vain; vainly the steeple clock of Grey rang out the hours to tell me of the other resting-place—for belfries are really sonorous lighthouses—I was a prisoner.

A prisoner! It made me smile. Long ago how frightened I should have been! A prisoner in the Ardennes! At the mercy of BrocÉliande, the monstrous forest which with its cavernous shade held a world in darkness between its boundaries, one being at Blois and the other in Constantinople! BrocÉliande! that scene of epic tales and puerile legends, country of the four sons of Aymon and of Hop-o’-my-Thumb, the forest of druids and goblins, the wood in which Sleeping Beauty fell into slumber while Charlemagne kept watch! What fantastic stories had not its thickets for a stage—were not the trees themselves living persons? “Oh, Aunt Lidivine,” I murmured, “how well you could give life to all those nonsensical tales every evening after dinner! The dear lady! Did she ever suspect the influence of her stories? Aunt, did you know that all your astounding puppets invaded my life by passing through my dreams? Do you know that a flourish of enchanted trumpets still sounds in my ears sometimes; you who made my nights at Fonval resound with the oliphant of Roland and the horn of Oberon?”

At that moment I could not check a movement of vexation; the head-lamps had just gone out after an agonized throb. For a second the darkness was total, and at the same time there was such a profound silence that I could well believe I had suddenly become blind and deaf.Then my eyes gradually became unsealed, and soon the crescent moon appeared, shedding its snowy light on the cold night. The forest became lit up with a frozen whiteness. I shivered. In my aunt’s lifetime it would have been with terror; I should have beheld in the darkness, where the vapors were creeping, dragons wallowing and serpents gliding. An owl flew off. I should have considered that bird the winged helm of a paladin—an enchanted paladin. The birch tree, standing straight up, shone with a lance-like gleam. An oak tree—a son perhaps of the magic tree which was the husband of the Princess LeÉlina—quivered. It was huge and druidical—a bunch of mistletoe hung on its main branch, and the moon cut through it with a shining sacred sickle.

Assuredly the nocturnal landscape was like an hallucination. For want of something better to do, I meditated on it. Without understanding why as well as I do to-day, I used to experience all its suggestiveness, and at nightfall I only ventured out unwillingly. Fonval itself was, I think, in spite of its countless flowers and its beautiful winding alleys, a most forbidding place. Its pointed windows, its hundred years old park inhabited by statues, the stagnant water of its pond, the precipice which closed it in, the Hell-like entrance, all these things made that ancient abbey (transformed into a chÂteau) peculiar even in daylight, and one would not have been surprised to learn that everybody there talked in fables. That would have been his real language.

That at any rate was how I talked, and still more how I acted, during my holidays. These were for me a long fairy tale in which I played with imaginary or artificial personages, living in the water, in the trees, and under the earth oftener than upon it. If I passed the lawn galloping with my bare legs, my air clearly showed the squadrons of knights were, in my fancy, charging behind me. And the old boat I masted for the occasion with three broomsticks, on which bellied nondescript sails, served me as a galleon, and the pond became the Mediterranean bearing the fleet of the Crusaders. Lost in thought and looking at the water-lily islands and the grass peninsulas, I proclaimed: “Here are Corsica and Sardinia!... Italy is in sight.... We are sailing round Malta....” At the end of a minute I cried “Land!” We were landing in Palestine—“Montjoye and St. Denis!”—I suffered on that boat sea-sickness and home-sickness; the Holy War intoxicated me;—I learnt in it two things—enthusiasm and geography....

But often the other characters were represented. That made it more real. I remembered then—for every child has a Don Quixote in him—I remembered a giant Briareus who was the summerhouse, and especially a barrel which became the dragon of Andromeda. Oh, that barrel! I had made a head for it with the help of a squinting pumpkin, and vampire wings with two umbrellas. Having ambushed my contraption at the bend of an alley, leaning it up against a terra-cotta nymph, I set out in search of it more valiant than the real Perseus, and, armed with a pole, I went caracoling on an invisible hippogriff. But when I discovered it, the pumpkin leered at me so strangely that Perseus almost took flight, and the umbrellas owed it to his emotion that they were broken to pieces in the yellow blood of the facetious vegetable.

My puppets did indeed make an impression on me by reason of the rÔle I assigned them. As I always reserved for myself that of protagonist, hero, conqueror, I easily surmounted that terror during the day, but at night, though the hero became little Nicolas Vermont, an urchin, the barrel remained a dragon. Cowering under the sheets, my mind excited by the story which my aunt had just finished, I knew the garden was peopled with my terrifying fancies, and that Briareus was mounting guard there all the time, and that the dreadful barrel, resuscitated, hiding its claws with its wings, watched my window from afar.

At that age I despaired of ever being, later on in life, like other people, and able to face the dark. And yet my fears did vanish, leaving me impressionable no doubt, but not a coward; and it was indeed I who found myself without dismay lost in the lonely wood—all too empty, alas, of fairies and enchanters.

I had just reached this point in my reverie, when a sort of vague noise arose in the Fonval direction; an ox’s lowing, and something like a dog’s long mournful howl. That was all—and then the sleeping calm returned.

Some minutes elapsed, and next I heard an owl hoot somewhere between myself and the chÂteau; another raised its voice not so far away as the first; and then others took flight from places nearer and nearer me, as if the passage of some creature were scaring them.

And indeed a light sound of steps like the trot of some four-footed animal, made itself heard and drew nearer on the roadway. I listened for some time to the beast moving to and fro in the labyrinth, losing itself like me perhaps, and then suddenly it appeared before me.

One could not mistake its spreading antlers, the height of its neck and the delicacy of its ears; it was a stag of ten. But hardly had I perceived it than it made off in a sudden volte-face. Then—had it gathered itself in to spring?—its body seemed to me strangely low and paltry, and was it a mere reflection?—seemed to me to be of a white color. The animal disappeared in a twinkling, and its little galloping steps died quickly away.

Had I at the first glance taken a goat for a stag? Or had I at the second glance taken a stag for a goat? To tell the truth, I was much interested and puzzled; so much so that I asked myself whether I were not going to resume the soul of the child I had been at Fonval.

But a little reflection made me realize that hunger, fatigue and sleepiness, helped out by moonshine, may easily cause one’s eyes to be deceived, and that a ray falling on an object and transforming it is no unwonted phenomenon.

I rather regretted it; for, having lost my terror of the mysterious, I had still kept my love for it. I am one of those who are sorry that “Philosophy has clipped an angel’s wings,” and yet I cannot let a mystery remain a mystery for me.

Now this beast was really a very extraordinary beast.

Wandering as it was through the incomprehensible labyrinth of the wood, it seemed to me an elusive riddle in a problem, and my curiosity was aroused.

But utterly wearied as I was, I soon fell asleep pondering detective ruses and subtle logical methods of investigation.

I awoke at dawn, and immediately I had a glimpse of a possible end to my imprisonment.

Not far from where I was, some men, hidden by the underwood, were walking and talking. Their steps came and went like those of the stag(?) treading, doubtless the same winding ways. At one moment they passed, still hidden, a few paces away from my car, but I could not understand their conversation—it seemed to be in German.

At last they stood before me at the very place where the animal had appeared. There were three of them, and they were bending down as if they were following a trail. At the spot where the beast had turned, one of them uttered an exclamation and made a gesture as if they should go back. But they perceived me and I advanced towards them.

“Gentlemen,” said I smiling my best, “could you kindly show me the way to Fonval? I have lost myself.”

The three men looked at me without replying, in an inquisitive and shy way.

They were a very remarkable trio.

The first possessed on the top of a massive and squat body a round and calamitously flat face, the thin pointed nose on which, as if it had been shoved into it, made the disc into a sundial.

The second had a military air and was twisting his mustache, which was on the German imperial model, and his chin stuck out like the toe of a boot.

A tall old man with gold spectacles, gray curly hair and an unkempt beard, made up the trio. He was eating cherries in a noisy way, as a bumpkin eats tripe.

They were obvious Germans, doubtless the assistants from the Anatomisches Institut.

The tall old man spat out in my direction a salvo of cherry-stones, and in the direction of his comrades, one of those Teuton phrases, in which a hail of shrapnel-like words mingles with other nameless noises.

They exchanged in their own way some remarks which resembled so many broadsides, without paying the least attention to me, and then after cleverly imitating with their mouths the sound of a battle going on beside a waterfall—having held a council, in fact—they turned on their heels and left me astounded at their rudeness.

But I had to get out of that fix somehow or other. My adventure became hourly more ridiculous. What was the meaning of all this? What comedy was I playing? Was I being made a fool of? I was furious. The would-be secrets I had fancied I scented now seemed to me mere childishness caused by weariness and the dark. The thing was to get away—to get away at once.

Raging and without reflection I made the contact which set the car going, and the 80 horse-power engine started to work in the bonnet with the humming of a hive of bees. I seized the starting lever—and then a great guffaw of laughter made me turn round.

With his cap over his ears, in blouse of blue, and with his letter-bag on his shoulder, hilarious and triumphant, a postman came on the scene.

“Ha, ha! I told you last night that you would lose your way,” said he in a drawling voice.

I recognized my villager of Grey-l’Abbaye, and bad temper prevented me answering him.

“It’s to Fonval you want to go, is it?” he went on.

I cursed Fonval in some very profane language in which I consigned it and its inhabitants to the Devil.

“Because,” went on the postman, “if you are going there, I’ll show you the way. I am taking the letters there. But make haste, I have double load to-day; for this is Monday and I don’t come on Sunday.”

While saying this, he had drawn his letters from his bag, and was arranging them in his hand.

“Show me that,” I cried sharply, “Yes, that yellow envelope.”He looked me up and down distrustfully and then let me look at it from a distance.

It was my letter—the announcement of my arrival, which followed it by a night, instead of preceding it by a day!

This untoward circumstance absolved my uncle and drove away my rancour.

“Get in,” I said. “You shall show me the way and then ... we shall have a talk!”

The car set off in the freshness of the morning.

A mist was just melting away, as if the sun after whitening the dark had still to dissolve it, and as if this faint fog, now almost nothing, were a portion of the darkness remaining in the form of vapor, an evanescent remainder of the night within the day, the vanishing specter of a vanished phantom.