The Murdered City and Other Stories by Fernand Mysor

Author:Fernand Mysor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press

For twenty-four hours I have been wearing the robe of a novice.

I have renounced my aristocratic name, and the forename of Patrice that Alexandrine-Ysolde took so much pleasure repeating, and which she chose herself. For those who surround me, since I no longer exist for the others, I call myself Irmin-Anaclet: Irmin-Anaclet, novice. I occupy, at the end of a secluded gallery, cell number 20, the narrowest, the most sordid and the most dismal. Others, I know, look out upon corners where a few trees are finishing their depletion, and from which one can perceive a patch of sky. For me, nothing. Not a scrap of azure. No courtyard. An immense wall that looms up directly in front of the loophole through which, logically, daylight ought to reach me, but which forbids that clarity with all of its unhealthy extent. I can see nothing but that wall, green-tinted by the centuries; and so long as this cell remains mine—which is to say, until the hour of my vows—I shall be condemned to this gloom…what am I saying? to this uninterrupted darkness, for daylight never enters my abode in the morning or the afternoon, nor in the resplendent minutes of sunset.

And why should I complain, in any case, of this burial? Have I not demanded, myself, in entering here, the most rigorous treatment, the most bitter fate? I have demanded it not only in the name of the humility in which I nourish the design of living henceforth, but also and above all because, having made at the outset a princely donation to the community, I understand that the obol in question does not exempt me from any of the ennuis, any of the chores, or any of the tasks devolved to those who surround me My desire, in any case, have been granted in the fullest measure. There is no base work, no odious labor, to which I am not constrained. Since my arrival here, all the monks, obedient to a mysterious order, have joined forces in order to make my life, already tenebrous and lugubrious, an existence even more painful that the one for which Père Athanase’s discourse had brutally prepared me.

And, evening having come, when I fall back into solitude after an irritating commerce with all those wearers of habits and hoods, when I review, with my head between my hands, the events of the day, I wonder whether these men are not veritably exceeding their rights, and whether the novitiate that is being rendered so harsh for me is not a novitiate instituted specifically for me, outside the rule and the discipline of this grim abode.

I have searched in vain among them for the slightest sign of sympathy, the slightest hint of benevolence. There is nothing confronting me but closed mouths, frowning eyebrows and hostile gazes. Is that how the forbearance and fraternity, in the name of which the son of the Virgin and the carpenter of Nazareth accepted to be crucified, are construed in these holy

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