Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

Toward midday a servant came to take us to the room where luncheon was served. The Prince and his wife were waiting for us, sitting at a table whose setting showed perfect taste. He introduced us to Princess Alexandra, whose splendid beauty & youth were very much at odds with her husband’s decrepit appearance. With her blond hair arranged in a complicated chignon, her blue eyes & her small, red mouth & dressed ravishingly in silk & organdie, she looked like a goddess come straight from Olympus. Unlike her husband, she spoke perfect German, a legacy, we later learned, of her Bavarian roots. Refined even in her movements, she walked & did everything extremely slowly, as if the least abruptness on her part would have brought the villa tumbling down about her ears. But this idiosyncrasy only made her all the more graceful & I blushed, tongue-tied, whenever she cast a glance in my direction.

“Good, good, good …,” said the Prince as the servants busied themselves about us, loading the table with the most exquisite dishes. “Do honor to this meager repast, I beg you.”

Deaf to this invitation, Kircher stood up to say grace &, not content with this piece of impertinence, took a long time consecrating the bread. I could see that our host was not accustomed to such ceremony & that he raised an eyebrow at the liberty my master had taken.

“Since the bread we have before us,” he said with a glint of malice, “could you me tell, Reverend Father, if its weight be lighter, after it taken out of the oven, when warm it is or cold?”

“Nothing easier to prove,” Athanasius replied, starting to eat, “when one has done the experiment oneself. Bread is heavier when it is warm & has just come out of the oven than when it has cooled down. A half pound of risen dough is two and a half ounces lighter cooked than raw & and even lighter when cooled. Which demonstrates that those who maintain that it is lighter raw than cooked are mistaken. One should never write, nor base oneself on anything other than genuine experiments, especially when they are as easy to prove as this one. Even Aristotle is sometimes wrong: in the fifth problem of the twenty-first section of his physics he claims that a salted loaf is lighter cold than warm & an unsalted loaf heavier. A simple experiment showed me however that the two loaves remain the same weight, whether cold or warm, whether they are salted or not.”

“Excellent, my sir, excellent,” the Prince said, sucking a chicken leg. “I did not expect less from you.”

Princess Alexandra turned to me &, matching action to words, said, “These gentlemen are too learned for me. And I have to admit, lighter or heavier, it is a matter of complete indifference: I prefer my bread with butter anyway.”

“Quite right too,” my master agreed, also helping himself.

As for me, I kept my eyes fixed on my plate.

The meal continued on the same bantering tone. Wines & dishes followed each other without interruption & Athanasius did justice to them, much to the satisfaction of our hosts. When large slices of grilled swordfish were served, my master begged me to recount our adventures at Messina. Despite feeling intimidated, I still managed to describe our fishing excursion in detail, though naturally omitting the episode that had led to Kircher’s confession. When I came to the death of the fish, I became so impassioned at the revolting memory that the Prince laughed at my sensitivity. But his wife had turned quite pale … Without a word, she put her hand on mine & I could tell that she shared my feelings. The Prince noticed the gesture, brief though it was, & abruptly stiffened.

After the meal we were served a very bitter liqueur based, so the Prince told us, on herbs from the mountains. He seemed to have become very heated & kept pestering my master with his questions. Then the Prince appeared to hesitate for a moment & after he had whispered a few words in Athanasius’s ear, the two of them went to the other end of the room, where they continued to converse in low voices.

Left alone with the Princess, I did not know how to behave, so moved I was by her beauty. I asked her a few questions about God & the nature of the soul, to which her replies showed intelligence & good sense. Since the subject did not seem to interest her particularly, I brought the conversation to the twisted statues we could see through the windows, asking her to tell me what they meant. She went very pale & appeared to waver before answering.

“I feel you are a young man I can trust & I am happy to tell you a story of which I have no need to be ashamed but which was the cause of both those monsters & my misfortune. As you perhaps noticed during the meal, my husband is of a very jealous nature; a few years ago, not many months after our wedding, despite myself I gave him occasion to feel his suspicions were justified. A cousin of mine, Ödön von Horvath, came to visit me here. He excelled in the art of composing airs for the lute or the spinet & this inestimable gift was only equaled by his beauty. As we were the same age & my interests were closer to his than to those of my husband, I was very happy to see him here & we passed whole days playing music together or discussing all kinds of topics. I enjoyed listening to him talk about the country of my birth & the loved ones I had left there. Alas, under the influence of youth and loneliness, he fell so passionately in love with me & declared his love so sincerely & so sensitively that I was moved by it. All I felt for him was affection & a sister’s love for her brother but I have to admit that I was secretly flattered by his attentions & his insistence might perhaps have eventually borne fruit. Chance, or Providence, if you prefer, saved me from the unfaithfulness without sparing me the shame. One evening after supper, when the Prince pretended to go to bed on the pretext that he had drunk too much during the meal, my cousin, even more aroused than usual because of the wine, abandoned himself to transports he normally managed to repress. He begged me to grant him a kiss & since I refused, threatened to go & kill himself on the spot; he was a man to carry out such a piece of madness, especially given the state he was in, with the result that the idea frightened me. I resisted less … he put his arm around my waist & took advantage of the moment to steal the kiss he seemed to have set his heart on. That was the moment when my husband surprised us. He didn’t say a word, but the coldness & cruelty I saw in his eyes made my blood run cold much more than if he had lost his temper. Ringing for the servants, he had my cousin dragged out of the room & locked me in my bedroom without giving me a chance to explain.

“Since that ill-fated evening, I have been shut away in this house, which my husband has transformed into a prison. As for my cousin, I have not had any news of him, but I know that he has not returned to Bavaria & I cannot stop myself constructing the worst hypotheses about his fate. Three months later workers started raising the walls around our park & installing on them the devilish statues that are intended to remind me ceaselessly of my supposed sin. But that would be nothing without the excessive cruelty with which my husband carried out his undertaking: if you look at these statues closely, you will see that many of them represent musicians; everything about them is grotesque, distorted, monstrous, everything apart from their faces, they are always the same, calm & angelic, as if surprised to find themselves in such company. The face,” the Princess quickly wiped away a large tear from her cheek, “is that of my cousin.”

I sympathized profoundly with this unhappy woman & felt so sorry for her misfortune that I poured out my sighs. I was speechless at her husband’s malevolence. I was trembling as I took her hand & squeezed it firmly as it seemed the only suitable way of consoling her a little.